The first trailer for independent film Tar, which premiered last year at the Rome Film Festival, was unveiled, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Written and directed by 12 New York University film students and featuring an all-star ensemble that includes James Franco, Mila Kunis, Jessica Chastain, Zach Braff and even Bruce Campbell, the artful film seeks to depict the life of C.K. Williams via his Pulitzer Prize-winning poems.

The ever-prolific Franco -- whose recent acting credits include This Is the End, Spring Breakers, Oz the Great and Powerful, Palo Alto, S&M art film Interior. Leather Bar., plus turns in his two directorial outings, Child of God and As I Lay Dying -- plays the writer at age 40, who, supported by wife Catherine (another pairing with Oz co-star Kunis), prepares to unveil his seminal verse collection, Tar, at a reading in New York City.

The narrative takes us from 1940s Detroit, where we meet Williams' mother (Chastain), through his adolescence in the 1950s (Braff plays a childhood friend who dies from illness) and towards his career pinnacle in the early 1980s.