'Molly's Game' Trailer: Jessica Chastain Builds A Poker Empire In Aaron Sorkin's Directorial Debut

Aaron Sorkin has a helluva story for his feature directorial debut. The writer behind The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball is telling another story of ambition and perseverance with Molly's Game. Based on Molly Bloom's fast-paced, high-stakes, and exceptionally entertaining memoir of the same name, Sorkin will show how she ran some of the most exclusive and lucrative underground poker games in Hollywood and New York.

Below, watch the first Molly's Game trailer.

After Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) almost made the Olympic Ski Team and before she attended Harvard Law School, she decided to take a year off before college. Within two weeks of living in Los Angeles, she found herself hosting games at the Viper Room on the Sunset Strip, or as it's called in the film, The Cobra Lounge.

Bloom quickly went from working in an office for a sleaze to running the sleaze's games. What started as a low-key underground game kept growing. Some notable names attended the games, including actors you'd all know. Bloom faced hurdle after hurdle creating her illegal business, which took a wrong turn when some members of the Russian mafia attended one of her games. Not long after they showed up, Bloom was greeted by 17 FBI agents in her home.

It looks like Chastain is completely embodying the spirit of Molly Bloom in this trailer. The Bloom on the page in the memoir is captured by what we see of Chastain in the trailer. The resilience, the confidence, and the unwillingness to back down or settle – it's all there. She's an extraordinary character. Bloom is also not unlike a lot of Sorkin's past boundary-pushing characters who fight to achieve their vision.

Sorkin didn't initially plan on directing the film when he took the writing job. "God knows I was scared going into it, but I just felt like if I was ever going to do it, it was going to be this," he told Entertainment Weekly. "I felt like there was a chance I could be good at it. I don't mean good at directing. I mean good at directing this movie." It was producers Mark Gordon and Amy Pascal who suggested Sorkin should direct Molly's Game. His voice is on full-volume in this trailer. Sorkin's dialogue and Chastain's work are the standouts of the first look at a very promising movie.

MOLLY'S GAME is the true story of Molly Bloom a beautiful, young, Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested in the middle of the night by 17 FBI agents wielding automatic weapons. Her players included Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknownst to her, the Russian mob. Her only ally was her criminal defense lawyer Charlie Jaffey, who learned that there was much more to Molly than the tabloids led us to believe.

Molly's Game opens in theaters November 22, 2017.