The Commitments’ writing duo Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais have scripted the film, and the script’s plot sounds, ahem, a bit bonkers. “Across The Universe” is directed by Julie Taymor, whose previous credits include Frida and the Broadway version of Disney’s The Lion King, and is an intense love story set in the 1960s.

Following two lovers, Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) and their musicain friends from Liverpool to Vietnam via a riot-torn Detroit and a psychedelic Greenwich Village – “Across The Universe” intends to explore emerging anti-war and counterculture movements.