Jackie: New York Film Festival sets Jacqueline Kennedy biopic's U.S. premiere

Following a successful tour of film festivals around the world, including high-profile stops in Venice and Toronto, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s Jacqueline Kennedy biopic, Jackie, will have its U.S. premiere as part of the 54th New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced Tuesday morning.

The Natalie Portman-starring biopic will screen on Thursday, Oct. 13 at Alice Tully Hall. It is the second of Larraín’s films showing at this year’s New York Film Festival, with the 40-year-old director’s Neruda showing the week prior as part of the event’s Main Slate.

Portman stars in the project as the titular widow of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. The film chronicles the First Lady’s period of grief as she navigates both public and professional scrutiny in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. Peter Sarsgaard costars as Bobby Kennedy, and Greta Gerwig has a supporting part as Nancy Tuckerman. John Hurt appears as a priest Kennedy confides in, while Billy Crudup and John Carroll Lynch round out the film’s supporting cast as a journalist who interviews Kennedy throughout the film and Lyndon B. Johnson, respectively.

Juan de Dios Larraín, Darren Aronofsky, Mickey Liddell, Scott Franklin, and Ari Handel produced the film.

Jackie was acquired by Fox Searchlight out of September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it received critical acclaim and won the event’s Toronto Platform Prize. The film’s screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim, won the Venice Film Festival’s Best Screenplay award on Sept. 10. Fox has set the picture for a Dec. 2 release date (up one week from its originally planned Dec. 9 theatrical debut) in North America, poising Portman for a Best Actress bid at the upcoming Academy Awards.

“She’s so well-known in terms of what she looks like and what she sounds like and how she moves, so to get that is definitely daunting,” Portman previously told EW about tackling the role of a prominent American icon. “[The set] was really playful and improvisatory, and I think it allows us to see many different sides of her. [We see] the toughness of who she was, dealing with what she had to go through while keeping herself together for the sake of the country and her family, and also the vulnerability and the intelligence of how she really crafted [JFK’s] legacy.”

The New York Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs from Sept. 30-Oct. 16. Tickets for Jackie are on sale now.