Here’s a first peek of Bryan Cranston as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who served time in prison for contempt of Congress at the dawn of the Cold War after refusing to play ball with the House Un-American Activities Committee during its original fishing expedition seeking information about communist influence in Hollywood. After prison came the blacklist that kept him offically unemployable through the 1950s, although that didn’t stop Trumbo from writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay for the 1953 Audrey Hepburn-Gregory Peck romantic comedy Roman Holiday (for which credit was given to Trumbo’s “front,” Ian McLellan Hunter), or the Oscar-winning story for the 1956 drama about a young boy trying to saving his pet bull from slaughter, The Brave One (under the pseudonym Robert Rich).

Joining Cranston in Jay Roach’s drama are Diane Lane, Elle Fanning, Michael Stuhlbarg, Louis C.K., Stephen Root, John Goodman, and in what is sure to be a highlight, Helen Mirren as one of the superstar (and vicious) gossip columnists of the era, Hedda Hopper. —Pam Grady