Who is Marilyn Monroe?

Was she a real person or just the character we saw on the silver screen? Blonde, a new fictional biography of the silver screen legend, based on the book of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates and starring Ana de Armas, tries to answer that question.

In the trailer, we see de Armas, transformed visually (if not quite aurally) into the iconic actress, dressing an unseen interviewer, in what looks like a typical biopic trope where she recounts her rise from nobody, to star, to tortured celebrity.

The trailer gives us flashes of some of Monroe’s most familiar images and clips: the upturned white blowing up as she straddles a sewer grate, the JFK serenade, and the pink glove-clad arms extended while crooning “Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend.”

We also see glimpses of Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, escorting a fully made-up Marilyn away from flashbulbs and into limousines and Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio, sharing a loving glance with a fresh-faced Marilyn as they lounge together in the sunshine.

But the Marilyn telling the story looks exhausted, hunted, and immensely sad. “I know you’re supposed to get used to it,” Marilyn sighs, “but I just can’t.” Pressed under the crushing weight of fame, she lashes out at others and herself, clawing her face until it bleeds, imagining herself in a coffin, and crashing her car into a tree.

“Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen,” she says as the trailer concludes.

The film, which will world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, is coming to Netflix on September 28th. It bears an NC-17 rating, effectively the first time a movie debuting on Netflix has received the restrictive rating. The movie got the rating for depicting sexual content has been considered too graphic for minors to see — including a scene that depicts sexual assault, which comes from the source material.

Blonde is written and directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). Scoot McNairy, Garret Dillahunt and Julianne Nicholson also star.