Richard Gere walks the walk in first trailer for Norman

Richard Gere obviously knows his way around New York City. In his last decade onscreen, the 67-year-old actor has spent more time walking the streets of the Big Apple than people who actually live there. His roles have included some of the most daring, textured work in his career: The Hoax, Brooklyn’s Finest, Arbitrage, and especially Oren Moverman’s remarkable Time Out of Mind, which was shot largely with zoom lenses, allowing Gere to blend into unsuspecting city crowds for his portrayal of a homeless man. (He is also appearing in Moverman’s upcoming The Dinner, also set in NYC.)

In Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, Gere plays a fictional New Yorker, though the type which most certainly exists in Manhattan’s heart and soul. He’s one of the middlemen in society — at best a professional Cupid; at worst a confidence man — who performs enough little favors for enough people that he becomes valuable as a guy who gets things done. That grows complicated when a politician (Lior Ashkenazi) he befriended three years earlier becomes the prime minister of Israel. Suddenly Norman’s friend requests grow out of his control.

Check out the exclusive trailer, above — boasting a fantastic supporting cast including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Steve Buscemi, Michael Sheen, Dan Stevens, and Hank Azaria — and the film’s official poster, below.

Norman, in theaters April 14, is the first English-language movie directed by Joseph Cedar (maker of the Oscar-nominated Israeli films Beaufort and Footnote).