Ten years ago, Keanu Reeves was attached to a biopic where he would play gangster Johnny Stompanato and Catherine Zeta-Jones would portray screen legend Lana Turner. If you’re unaware of their story together, Stompanato was Turner’s abusive boyfriend and was eventually killed by Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane. Or, as the popular theory goes, Turner murdered her own lover but Crane took the heat because she was a minor.
Now Reeves stars in The Whole Truth, a legal drama he told us about two years ago that arrives in theaters next month, and interestingly enough it looks a lot like it’s inspired by the Stompanato/Turner/Crane case. Directed by Courtney Hunt (Frozen River) and written by Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune), the movie appears to be about a teenage boy (The Kings of Summer‘s Gabriel Basso) taking the rap when his mother (Renee Zellweger) kills her abusive husband (Jim Belushi).
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That may not be what happens, and The Whole Truth seems like it could be another Rashomon-type approach to the idea of there being different sides to a story. But it’s not about perspective on the events so much as the withholding of what really happened. Either way, Reeves plays the lawyer attempting to get the boy acquitted, with help from a new assistant played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The movie has already debuted in other parts of the world, but you can check it out here on October 21.