Before director Roland Emmerich destroys and then saves the planet—again—in Independence Day: Resurgence, he'll take an unusual detour with the much more personal Stonewall. The movie tells the story of the 1969 New York City riots that served as a flashpoint in the LGBTQ rights movement, and its first trailer gives us insight into how exactly the openly gay director approached the retelling of this iconic moment in American history.
After the fictional Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine) is kicked out of his house for being gay, he winds up in New York where he meets a group of kids who bring him to the Stonewall Inn, the famous Greenwich Village watering hole that became the epicenter of New York's gay revolution. Led by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a group coalesces and eventually fights back against constant police harassment and other injustices that were all too common at the time. For Emmerich, a director who's made his name with apocalyptic fantasies like The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, Stonewall might be the smallest film he's ever made, but it is no doubt the most important. You can catch it in theaters on September 25.
