Exclusive: The National Recording New Song For Sundance-Bound 'Win Win'

Plus Here's Your First Look At Paul Giamatti In The Tom McCarthy-Directed Drama

The 2011 Sundance Film Festival is just around the corner, and details are starting to emerge about which movies will be making appearances and who will be starring in meta-textual Beastie Boys pastiches. And now we can give you a little more information about one movie that will be coming to Sundance (and which indie rock sensation will be doing the movie's theme song).

Sources close to the project tell us that Brooklyn transplant indie-rockers The National, who are currently riding high with their album High Violet being on everyone's Top 10 Albums of 2010 list, are busily prepping a new song to serve as the theme to writer/director/actor/sometimes-Comic-Con moderator Thomas McCarthy's "Win Win," starring Paul Giamatti as an attorney-cum-wrestling coach. The film will make its big splash at Sundance, so the band is furiously working to finish the song in time.

Here's the official synopsis:

Struggling attorney Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), who volunteers as a high school wrestling coach, takes on the guardianship of an elderly client in a desperate attempt to keep his practice afloat. When the client’s teenage grandson runs away from home and shows up on his grandfather’s doorstep, Mike’s life is turned upside down as his win-win proposition turns into something much more complicated than he ever bargained for.

Maybe because director Tom McCarthy is also a skilled actor, he has an innate ability to mine his material for those nuances that expose the delicate human conflicts that drive his characters. They struggle to be good as their almost-understandable flaws put them to the test. You get the distinct feeling that his actors love working for him because they do their jobs so well. Win Win could refer to the old adage about how we play the game, but more simply, it just means that doing right brings out the best in all of us.

Those who were enchanted by McCarthy's earlier films, the charmingly modest dramas "The Station Agent" and "The Visitor," should be excited about the movie, as should anyone who has rocked out to a National album in the past few years.