'Motherless Brooklyn' Trailer: Edward Norton Is A Detective With Tourette's In 1950s Crime Drama

Edward Norton's longtime passion project is finally coming to theaters. The Oscar-nominated actor has spent nearly two decades trying to get Motherless Brooklyn off the ground, an adaptation of the 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem. And now, it has finally arrived with the official Motherless Brooklyn trailer signaling that this movie, which Norton directs and stars in, does indeed exist. Watch the Motherless Brooklyn trailer below.

Motherless Brooklyn follows Lionel Essrog, a man suffering from Tourette's Syndrome who works for a shady small-time neighborhood car service that doubles as a "detective agency" in Brooklyn. Populated by a group of misfits and orphans, the detectives all look up to Frank, a small-time mobster who one day turns up dead, leading Lionel on a strange and twisted journey to find his killer. The film changes up the setting of Jonathan Lethem's book of the same name, which takes place in modern-day, and transplants the story to 1950s New York.

Norton will also star in the film, along with Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Leslie Mann, Bobby Cannavale, Fisher Stevens, and Cherry Jones.

Nortion optioned the novel way back in 1999 when it was published, and has been trying to get the film made ever since, only stepping on as director and star in 2014. While it took him nearly five years to get it made, Motherless Brooklyn is one of the most anticipated movies of the upcoming festival circuit, making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September and closing out the New York Film Festival in October.

Here is the synopsis for the novel by Jonathan Lethem:

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in the most startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Motherless Brooklyn is set to hit theaters on November 1, 2019.