When Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in 1985, the novel’s attention was keenly focused on the way modern technology had already wrought an inescapable impact on human society. More than 30 years later, our technology is very different from DeLillo’s manifestations of television and radio, but the power of this concept has been given new life in Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation of the novel. You can check out the trailer below. 

White Noise Main Trailer

The appropriately cryptic teaser for the film showcases Baumbach’s take on White Noise’s inciting incident: a chemical spill releases a toxic cloud that looms over the story and its characters. At the center of the cloud is Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor of “Hitler Studies” grappling with life, death and the much more granular concerns of a day to day life. Alongside his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and his four children, Jack searches for happiness, as the toxic world around him grows more and more uncertain.

In White Noise, Baumbach is reteaming with his Marriage Story muse Driver as well as his Mistress America star (and real-life partner) Gerwig. Also along for the ride is Don Cheadle, who plays Jack’s fellow professor Murray Siskind, an Elvis expert; the pair share a fascination with (what else?) the peculiar sociological appeal of the American supermarket.  

White Noise will open the Venice Film Festival on August 31, followed by the New York Film Festival on September 30. “Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise is an unequivocal triumph: a wildly entertaining and morbidly funny meditation on the way we live now that is also the director’s most ambitious and expansive film,” says Dennis Lim, artistic director at NYFF. “Aided by a brilliant cast led by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, Baumbach has not only captured the essence of Don DeLillo’s beloved, era-defining book — he has turned it into a movie that speaks profoundly to our moment.” 

“Do not advance the action according to a plan,” Driver intones over the closing moments of the teaser. You should still, of course, make a plan to catch White Noise on Netflix this fall.