Don DeLillo’s rarely been adapted for film and Noah Baumbach’s never adapted a novel*. Does that make them certain bedfellows? Well, no, probably not even a little bit—different fixations, ways of weighing the world, and, I think most crucially, senses of humor. Which could be just the stuff for a worthwhile moment in time and good reason Baumbach is, confirming rumors that have swirled for months, adapting DeLillo’s seminal novel White Noise. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig will star, Netflix produces, and per a Production Weekly listing (filtered via Jason Osia on Twitter), production commences in June.

A campus satire / oddball marriage comedy / horror story about industrialization, White Noise concerns Jack Gladney (that’ll be Driver), professor of Hitler studies at the university referred to only as (again: campus satire) The-College-on-the-Hill. His life as teacher of Hitler, husband to Babette (Gerwig), and father to four children / stepchildren is torn asunder by “the Airborne Toxic Event,” a cataclysmic train accident that casts chemical waste over his town. Plot, par for DeLillo, is more a texture within his melange of language—its phonetics as read, its aesthetics as presented on the page—cultural history, bone-dry humor, and paranoia about the world at large. It was also defined by the culture endemic to its 1985 publication. How or if Baumbach shifts that is already of paramount interest.

Based on the book by Don DeLillo, a film by Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, WHITE NOISE coming soon to select theaters and Netflix.

At once hilarious and horrifying, lyrical and absurd, ordinary and apocalyptic, White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo, written for the screen and directed by Noah Baumbach, produced by Noah Baumbach (p.g.a) and David Heyman (p.g.a.). Produced by Uri Singer.