James Dean’s face is one of Hollywood’s most familiar images. A new film is approaching his life through someone who knew him before that image became a legend.
Mitchell Robertson has been cast as writer Bill Bast opposite Brandon Flynn as Dean in One Hand Tied, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s November 10 casting exclusive.
Written and directed by Guy Guido, the project was previously known as Willie and Jimmy Dean. It adapts Bast’s 2006 memoir, Surviving James Dean.
The man behind the memoir
Bast described meeting Dean at UCLA when they were both 19. In his account, their lives became intertwined as roommates, friends and eventually lovers, with their intimacy kept private as Dean pursued his career.
The relationship is the subject of the memoir and the film’s interpretation of it. Those recollections should be attributed to Bast, rather than presented as a definitive answer to every question about Dean’s sexuality.
There is another revealing layer to the book’s history. Bast had already published a biography of Dean in 1956, shortly after the actor’s death. As the library record quoting the later memoir’s jacket explains, he returned to their story decades afterwards to address material he had not felt able to explore fully the first time.
A contemporary Publishers Weekly review describes the memoir as an account of Bast’s coming out, their friendship and Dean’s lasting impact on his life.
That makes this more than a question of which label to attach to a famous man. It is also about who gets to tell an intimate story, and how long it can take to feel able to tell it.
Two actors, a different perspective
Robertson’s breakthrough came playing the younger Niall in Half Man, the Richard Gadd series whose official press materials identify him as the younger counterpart to Jamie Bell.
Flynn, familiar to audiences from 13 Reasons Why, was previously announced as Dean. The project follows the men’s connection from their first meeting through Dean’s death in 1955 at 24.
There is a poignant contrast with the present. Flynn celebrated his marriage to playwright Jordan Tannahill in 2024, in a wedding shared publicly in Vogue. The story he is helping bring to the screen concerns an era when two men’s private affection could threaten their public futures.
For audiences who know Dean chiefly through Rebel Without a Cause, the appeal is a shift in perspective: away from the endlessly reproduced photograph and towards Bast’s memories of the person who shared his life.
📷 Hulton Archive / @brandonflynn