Vanessa Hudgens Takes Lily Rabe Out on the Town inDowntown OwlTrailer (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

The new movie (available to buy or rent on digital April 23) marks theAmerican Horror Storystar’s directorial debut alongside longtime boyfriend andMidnight Massstar Hamish Linklater, who adapted the screenplay from Chuck Klosterman’s 2008 novel of the same name.

PEOPLE has the exclusive first look at Sony Pictures Entertainment’s “Great Plains dark dramedy”Downtown Owl, which costarsEd Harris, August Blanco Rosenstein,Jack Dylan Grazer, Arianna Jaffier, Finn Wittrock andHenry Golding.

Rabe plays Julia, a woman retreating to an 800-strong town of Owl, North Dakota in 1983. “You’re back in high school now,” Hudgens’ outgoing character Naomi tells Julia in the trailer. “And everyone’s looking at you through homecoming glasses.”

Vanessa Hudgens and Lily Rabe in “Downtown Owl”.sony pictures

sony pictures

She urges Julia to let her hair down for a night on the — small — town. “Wear your least comfortable bra,” she advises.

Julia is “searching for a break from her cosmopolitan life in Milwaukee,” per the movie’s official synopsis. After arriving to teach high school for a semester in “the close-knit Reagan-era town of Owl,” it continues, “the small town turns out to be a wonderland of second-string poets, smoldering Marlboro Men, and a social hierarchy that echoes high school.”

The synopsis adds, “Julia doesn’t know if she’s come to town to get away from home or to find it.”

Behind the scenes of “Downtown Owl”.sony pictures

In the trailer, Rabe can be seen partying with Hudgens at the town’s local bar Hugo’s, asking Harris for guidance, and getting snowed into her car in North Dakota’s harsh winters.

“Pretty much everyone advises against making a movie with the parent of your children, especially your first movie, especially when the newest child is a newborn,” Rabe, 41, and Linklater, 47, tell PEOPLE in a statement. The couple, who have been dating since around 2016, share three children together.

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Lily Rabe in “Downtown Owl”.sony pictures

“But makingOwlwas so rewarding, and we hope audiences have as exhilarating an experience watching it as we had working on it together,” they add.

The filmmaking duo also call the movie’s cast “all such elite talents and humans” who “just dropped from heaven into our prairie badlands.”

Downtown Owlis available to buy or rent on digital April 23.

source: people.com