Come gather round people, wherever you roam, and admit that you’d really quite like to see A Complete Unknown director-star duo James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet team up again. We know we certainly would — and, according to Deadline‘s ‘The Dish’ sidebar, it looks like we actually might. Yes, the trade is reporting that Mangold and Chalamet, fresh off an incredibly busy awards season run with their eight-Oscar nominated Bob Dylan biopic, are looking to get back in the saddle with High Side, a motocross heist movie based on an unpublished Jaime Oliveira short story.
“But Empire, what do you mean a motocross heist movie?” we hear you cry. Is it a movie about heisting motocross bikes? A movie about heisting on motocross bikes? Well, funny you should ask. As a synopsis provided to Deadline clarifies, it’s very much the latter. By the looks of things, the basic plot revolves around a traumatised former MotoGP racer named Billy whose formidable skill on two-wheels gets put to new, even more dangerous use when his estranged brother, on the lam from the FBI, recruits him to help with a series of audacious bank robberies. And as if that doesn’t sound adrenaline-fuelled enough already, there’s a mismatched crew Billy and his brother band together for their heisting hijinks, an FBI agent who has a personal history with Billy’s bro chasing their tails, and — at the centre of it all — an ambitious bank job set to take place during a major motorcycle parade. Crikey!
Now, when exactly High Side would prospectively be hitting our screens is an unknown quantity for now: Chalamet is busy out in Hungary shooting Dune Part 3 and has A24 ping-pong joint Marty Supreme coming out later this year, while Mangold is still on the slate for Star Wars prequel Dawn Of The Jedi as of right now. We also don’t know if Chalamet would be playing the crash-surviving MotoGP racer, his con brother, the FBI agent, or someone else entirely. But even without a release date on the horizon to glom onto, the idea of Mangold and Chalamet doing ostensibly their motocross version of Logan Lucky is enough to have our engines revved and ready to go.
