David Chase‘s Not Fade Away, a period drama about the travails of a New Jersey band in the mid ’60s, will debut at the 50th New York Film Festival on Saturday, 10.6, as the Centerpiece Gala. Pic costars John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett and Christopher McDonald. The soundtrack is produced by longtime Bruce Springsteen E Street band member and Sopranos cotar Steven Van Zandt. Paramount Vantage will open Not Fade Away on 12.21.12. Chase knows what he’s doing, but this sounds smallish, funky, good-timey.

Chase can romanticize Italian-American New Jersey culture all he wants, but I lived in New Jersey for a while and I know what those guys were like. They were very gang-ish, very unto themselves. And they were bullies. They would give you hostile looks (“Wanna start somethin’?”) in school hallways. One time three or four of them were sitting on a park bench, and as I walked by one shouted in my direction, “Hey, man…you a guinea?” No, I said. “Then what good are ya?” And they weren’t that hip at the end of the day. So fuck them, okay? Not now but if I could go back in a time machine I would take a baseball bat and tell them to go fuck themselves if they looked at me cross-eyed.