Jennifer Lawrence to Produce and Star in New Paolo Sorrentino Film ‘Mob Girl’

Jennifer Lawrence is set to star in and produce a new film from Paolo Sorrentino, the Academy Award-winning director of films such as “Youth” and “The Great Beauty,” as well as HBO series “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope.” Variety reports that Lawrence will play a mob wife turned police informant in the project, an adaptation of the true-crime novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Teresa Carpenter.

Lawrence will produce along with Justine Polsky via their production company, Excellent Cadaver. The company is teaming with Universal-backed indie studio Makeready, which is also backed by Entertainment One and headed up by former New Regency president and CEO Brad Weston. Sorrentino will also produce alongside Wildside’s Lorenzo Mieli. Producer and writer Angelina Burnett (“The Americans,” “Halt and Catch Fire”) has been tapped to adapt the script.

“Seeing this story from a woman’s point of view is a fresh and exciting approach to telling a classic mob story,” Weston told Variety. “We could not imagine a more perfect team of stellar filmmakers, with Jennifer starring in a tour de force role and Paolo at the helm, to bring Arlyne’s strength and unique perspective to life on screen.”

Lawrence will play Arlyne Brickman, a Jewish woman growing up among racketeers on the Lower East Side of New York City who eventually becomes involved in the glamorous and flashy lifestyle of New York mobsters. Soon after, she begins running errands for the “wiseguys” she dates, and ends up getting in on the action herself. After being raped and beaten and left to fend for herself by her mafia connections, Brickman becomes a police informant and a major witness in the government’s case against the Colombo crime family.

“From the time she was about fourteen, Arlyne was an active seductress of the underworld and by the time she was twenty, she had slept with upward of fifty hoods from the Lower East Side,” reads an excerpt from the book. “Forever status conscious, she amassed a slate of conquests that included the notorious Bonnano hit man Tony Mirra and, briefly, Joe Colombo. But as Arlyne would learn in her more than thirty years in the underworld, living the mob girl ideal was a considerably tawdrier proposition than imagining it.”

First up for Sorrentino is “Loro,” a political satire about scandal-ridden former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, hitting theaters this fall.