You won’t have any problem forgetting some of the more outrageous characters Jason Segel has played over throughout his career once you sit down and watch the first trailer for James Ponsoldt‘s David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour. Segel’s performance as the brilliant but severely depressed writer is already getting praise from circles that saw the film at Sundance Film Festival this past winter.

Unlike many traditional biopics, Ponsoldt does not feel the need to tell the whole story of David Foster Wallace’s life. The End of the Tour instead focuses on the final five days of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest, the last of his novels that would be published before his suicide in 2008. Journalist David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, followed Wallace on these last few tour stops, and the brutal distance between the writer struggling with his own fame and success and the journalist obsessed with that fame is very apparent in this trailer.

Segel is being heralded for his subtle and quiet portrayal of a writer who openly struggled with his disillusion and depression while writing some of the most thought-provoking and moving literature of his time. Anna Chlumsky, Joan Cusack and Ron Livingston also co-star alongside Eisenberg to round out the cast. From college classrooms to NPR’s recording studio, David Foster Wallace left an indelible mark on the literary community, and this moviegoer hopes that Segel is up to the job of bringing him to life.

The End of the Tour opens in theaters on July 31st, 2015.