Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza Join Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘Tomorrow Is a Drag’

Kenneth Lonergan is finally coming back — and he’s bringing some of the best actors working today with him. A decade after Manchester by the Sea swept awards season and made Casey Affleck a household name, the Oscar-winning filmmaker has set his next film: Tomorrow Is a Drag, with Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Vanessa Kirby, and Matthew Broderick all attached to star. The project launched sales at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, with MK2 Films handling international and WME repping North America.

Plot details are being kept tightly under wraps, but the title alone feels very Lonergan — that particular mix of wry humor and gut-punch emotion that defined Manchester by the Sea, his 2011 drama Margaret, and his debut You Can Count on Me. Oscar-winning producer Sara Murphy, who produced Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, is on board under her Fat City banner. Cameras are expected to roll this fall in New York.

For Driver, this is a reunion with a filmmaker he already has history with. The two previously collaborated on Lonergan’s off-Broadway play Hold On to Me Darling, and the chemistry between a writer-director of Lonergan’s caliber and an actor of Driver’s intensity is the kind of pairing that gets people excited. Broderick, meanwhile, is also returning to the Lonergan fold — he appeared in both Margaret and You Can Count on Me, as well as the playwright’s stage work The Starry Messenger.

Plaza and Driver last shared a screen in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, making Tomorrow Is a Drag their second collaboration. For Plaza, it joins a packed slate that includes Michael B. Jordan’s The Thomas Crown Affair, Zach Woods’ The Accompanist, and The Heidi Fleiss Story, which is being co-written by Rachel Sennott.

The Timing Couldn’t Be Better for Driver

The announcement landed at Cannes at just the right moment. Driver is currently in the south of France presenting James Gray’s Paper Tiger — and the response to that film has been extraordinary. The drama, which also stars Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson, tells the story of two brothers entangled with the Russian mafia while chasing the American Dream. Driver plays Gary, a divorced ex-cop with ties to the mafia, and early reviews are calling it the best work of his career.

IndieWire critic David Ehrlich put it plainly in his review: “Heartbreakingly portrayed by Adam Driver in a career-best performance that stretches across flash, menace, and pure sincerity like a foot stepping down on a bed of nails without drawing blood, Gary is a vintage ’80s showboat who only knows how to show affection by offering to share in his apparent success.”

The film’s Cannes premiere drew a ten-minute standing ovation at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, with Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, and director Paweł Pawlikowski among those leading the applause. An emotional James Gray addressed the crowd, saying: “There’s much more gray now in the beard, not just the name, but the beard. And I have learned finally to appreciate. But more I appreciate you, without you, there is no cinema, cinema needs you. And cinema needs you guys more than ever.”

Scarlett Johansson, who plays Teller’s character’s wife in Paper Tiger — a notable flip from Marriage Story, where she was divorcing Driver’s character — told The Hollywood Reporter she wished she’d had even more scenes with him. “I would’ve loved to have had even more scenework with him, I love working with him,” she said. She was equally effusive with People, saying simply: “I love Adam as a person and he is an absolutely extraordinary actor. If I could make every movie with Adam Driver, I would.”

NEON has acquired distribution rights to Paper Tiger for North America.

Driver has already earned back-to-back Oscar nominations — Best Supporting Actor for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman in 2018 and Best Actor for Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story in 2019. With Paper Tiger generating this kind of buzz and Tomorrow Is a Drag now in the pipeline with Lonergan behind the camera, his next awards cycle is shaping up to be very interesting.