EXCLUSIVE: Following the success of The Iron Claw, director Sean Durkin and A24 have found their next project to team on and have assembled some serious star power to lead it. Sources tell Deadline that Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler are set to star in Deep Cuts, a movie based on the debut novel of Holly Brickley. Durkin is on board to direct and adapt. Ronan is also on board to produce.

Set in the 2000s, Deep Cuts is a love story about two music-obsessed twentysomethings navigating the messy realities of ambition, belonging and adulthood over the course of an era-defining decade. The novel was published Tuesday by Crown.

Central’s Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush and Josh Safdie will join Ronan as producers.

Durkin’s most recent film The Iron Claw starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White was a critical darling and one of A24’s bigger domestic hits of 2023. He is repped by UTA and Entertainment 360.

Ronan is coming off a busy 2024 that included the Apple World War II drama Blitz as well as Sony Pictures Classics’ The Outrun. She is repped by CAA.

Butler also had himself a busy 2024 starting with the Apple miniseries Masters of the Air. On the feature side he starred in Dune: Part Two and The Bike Riders. He can be seen next in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing. He is repped by WME, Brillstein Entertainment Partners and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern.

Brickley is originally from British Columbia and studied at UC Berkeley before getting her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. She now lives in Portland, OR, with her husband and two daughters. She is repped by CAA.