Garfield, Garner and Gay Harden Traveling Down “Back Roads”

Yeah, OK, so it's based on one of Oprah's Book of the Month selections, but let's not go all Jonathan Franzen, folks.

Andrew Garfield, Jennifer Garner and Marcia Gay Harden are on board to star in an adaptation of Tawni O'Dell's bestselling debut novel, "Back Roads," reported Variety.

A quick scan of a synopsis from O'Dell's website suggests the film is an epic bummer:

Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking beer and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three younger sisters after the shooting death of his physically abusive father and the arrest of his mother. His existence has become a joyless, exhausting blur of day care, mac and cheese dinners, working two minimum wage jobs, and monthly prison visits to a once-devoted mother who seems not only resigned but glad to have handed over the reins of parent and homemaker to her young son. As he sees it, his life is "lousy with women. All ages, shapes, sizes and levels of purity." Frustrated, overwhelmed, plagued by violent fantasies and trapped by feelings of love and duty, he's a guy in an impossible situation: an orphaned child with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager.

Garfield of course will play Harley, with Gay Harden as his mother, while Garner will play the neighbor down the road with whom Harley becomes obsessed.

Directing the film is Adrian Lyne, whose filmography includes movies like "Unfaithful," "Lolita," Fatal Attraction," "Nine 1/2 Weeks" and "Foxes," so we're guessing the focus will be on Harley's relationship with the sexy neighbor lady.

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