Gangster Squad character artWhen your leading cast features some of the biggest and best names in Hollywood at the moment, and you have one of the most promising directors to emerge in recent years, you know you’re onto something good.

Gangster Squad sees Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Sean Penn, and Josh Brolin take the lead, with support coming in the form of Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Peña, and Robert Patrick.

We caught a new trailer for the film last week, and now Yahoo Movies have released this absolutely brilliant new character art giving us a look at the main players ahead of its US release in just under two months’ time.

“Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) runs the show in this town, reaping the ill-gotten gains from the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes and—if he has his way—every wire bet placed west of Chicago. And he does it all with the protection of not only his own paid goons, but also the police and the politicians who are under his control. It’s enough to intimidate even the bravest, street-hardened cop…except, perhaps, for the small, secret crew of LAPD outsiders led by Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), who come together to try to tear Cohen’s world apart.”

Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is taking an intriguing new direction behind the camera, directing from a script by Will Beall (Castle), who makes his feature debut (and who has been hired to write the Justice League film), based on Paul Lieberman’s original seven-part article in the LA Times.

Gangster Squad will be released in the US on 7th September, followed by a later UK release on 9th November. It definitely looks like it will be worth the wait though, and despite it still being very early days, the cast alone is enough to consider it an Oscar contender. As usual, you can click to enlarge – here’s to hoping the final poster looks like this, because it’s awesome (and nicely quad poster-shaped).

Gangster Squad character art