Coming Soon: The Movies That Inspired The Bombshell with Darrow Farr
A week-long series on five films that shaped the "towering literary achievement"
On May 27th, 2025, Pamela Dorman Books will publish The Bombshell, the highly anticipated debut novel from Darrow Farr. I have maintained a passing acquaintance with Darrow—“Darri” to her friends and family, she tells me—since 2010, when we met in a Secret History-esque selective creative writing class reserved for the most elite undergraduate writers at NYU. More than a decade later, Darrow contacted me out of the blue with an unexpected offer. She wanted to know if I might be interested in applying my patented brand of renegade criticism, the sort of veil-rending practiced on The Best Movie Substack, to an early draft of her book. The draft, she warned me, was nearly 600 pages long.
At first I was hesitant to accept Darrow’s offer, being insanely busy with my deranged movie reviews (and a little suspicious of her motives), but after reading a synopsis of her novel-in-progress I found myself more than intrigued; I was volunteering to read her draft—and subsequent ones—with genuine enthusiasm. Here’s the synopsis:
Corsica, 1993. As a sun-drenched Mediterranean summer heads into full swing, beautiful and brash seventeen-year-old Séverine Guimard is counting down the days until graduation, dreaming of stardom while smoking cigarettes, and seducing boys in her class to pass the time. The pampered French American daughter of a politician, Séverine knows she’s destined for bigger things.
That is, until one night, Séverine is snatched off her bike by a militant trio fighting for Corsican independence and held for a large ransom. When the men fumble negotiating her release, the four become unlikely housemates deep in the island’s remote interior. Eager to gain the upper hand, Séverine sets out to charm her captors, and soon the handsome, intellectual leader, Bruno, the gentle university student, Tittu, and even the gruff, unflappable Petru grow to enjoy the company of their headstrong hostage.
As Séverine is exposed to the group’s politics, they ignite something unexpected within her, and their ideas begin to take root. With her flair for the spotlight and newfound beliefs, Séverine becomes the face of a radical movement for a global TV audience. What follows is a summer of passion and terror, careening toward an inevitable, explosive conclusion, as Séverine steps into the biggest role of her life.
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As I read and reread that initial draft of The Bombshell, I was not only impressed with the aesthetic ambition, emotional nuance, and sentence-level craft on display, but by how Darrow had integrated seemingly incongruous literary and cinematic influences into her novel. The Bombshell was as much a product of Colette and D.H. Lawrence as it was a product of the sideshow camp of John Waters, the French New Wave, and Barbra Streisand’s nose. Preliminary praise for the novel confirmed that I wasn’t alone in my admiration for the book’s fusing of elements from the page and the screen. In naming it one of the best books of 2025 so far, Vogue described The Bombshell as “Hollywood-ready.”
Aside from my thorough and perspicacious line edits, my main piece of advice for Darrow’s revisions was to double the novel’s length at a minimum (she is my wife, after all), and it speaks to her better instincts and artistry that she responded by cutting 200 pages from the final draft. In anticipation of the release of this shorter, superior version of The Bombshell, I invited Darrow to participate in a month-long series examining five movies that inspired the plot, characters, mood, and politics of her novel in ways straightforward and surprising. This post is another invitation, an invitation to our subscribers to watch these films, each of them fascinating and significant in their own right, before Darrow and I discuss them. The itinerary for our series is below. You can and should preorder your copy of The Bombshell here.
The Movies That Inspired The Bombshell with Darrow Farr
Preliminary Post Schedule
May 26th: Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1989) - Directed by Pedro Almodovar
June 2nd: La Collectionneuse (1967) - Directed by Eric Rohmer
June 7th: Carlos (2010) - Directed by Olivier Assayas
June 14th: Hello, Dolly (1969) - Directed by Gene Kelly
June 21st: Band of Outsiders (1964) - Directed by Jean-Luc Godard