A new film drama about David Bowie’s early-’70s period, as he made the transformation into Ziggy Stardust, is set for release later this year.

Stardust was directed by Gabriel Range and stars actor and singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn as Bowie. It focuses specifically on Bowie’s early 1971 press trip across America, accompanied by Mercury Records publicist Ron Oberman. Without a visa or musician’s union paperwork, he was unable to perform songs from the recently released The Man Who Sold The World album, and was greeted with bemusement and sometimes ridicule. But as the film’s press material states, “he found some of the ideas and influences that he would meld together to create his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.”

Watch the first clip, featuring Marc Maron as Oberman, below:

Says Range, “I set out to make a film about what makes someone become an artist; what actually drives them to make their art. That someone is David Bowie, a man we’re used to thinking about as the star he became, or as one of his alter egos: Ziggy Stardust; Aladdin Zane; The Thin White Duke. Someone I only ever saw at a great distance, behind a mask; a godlike, alien presence. Even in his perfectly choreographed death, he didn’t seem like a regular human being.

“The film is very much grounded in fact but it’s also a work of speculative fiction. We took license with some of the relationships and the film has a slightly heightened, playful tone. But I hope it is true to the spirit of where David was at around that point in his life.”