Hollywood’s most reliable index of a movie star’s ambitions is no longer the size of the role but the size of the story around it. David Oyelowo — an Oscar-caliber lead in Selma, and a producer and director in his own right — has signed on to Little Five not as its center of gravity but as its conscience, joining a female-led ensemble in a regional American underdog drama. The choice says as much about where independent film is finding its footing as it does about Oyelowo: prestige talent is increasingly migrating toward small, place-specific true stories that the franchise economy no longer bothers to tell.

As Deadline first reported, Oyelowo will play Randall, a former cycling champion whose own dreams were cut short and who is reluctantly pulled back into the sport as an unlikely mentor. He stars opposite Ariana Greenblatt and Rain Spencer, the young leads announced earlier this summer, alongside Sasha Frolova, Nadia Alexander, Drew Powell and Max Cortezi. Ian Samuels directs from a screenplay by Gillian Williams.

Little Five draws its title and its engine from the Little 500, the grueling relay bicycle race that has defined spring at Indiana University since 1951 and gave Peter Yates’s Breaking Away its climax. Where that Oscar-winning film followed a townie boy, this one turns to the women who forced their way onto the track, chronicling the scrappy team that launched the first women’s Little 500 and challenged a tradition that had left them on the sidelines.

The project is a joint venture between Anne Hathaway‘s Somewhere Pictures — the shingle she runs with Adam Shulman and Johnathan Rice — and Bloomington-based Pigasus Pictures, whose founder Zachary Spicer has built a production model around shooting Indiana stories in Indiana. For Somewhere Pictures, still assembling its early slate, Oyelowo’s arrival is a credibility signal: an A-list name willing to play a supporting mentor because the material, not the billing, is the draw.

It is a register Oyelowo knows. From the moral steel of Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma to the weathered lawman of Lawmen: Bass Reeves, he has specialized in men who carry a cause heavier than themselves — and Randall, a champion undone and asked to build someone else’s victory, sits squarely in that lineage.

Production is set to roll in Bloomington this summer, the Little 500’s own oval standing in for its history. Nearly half a century after Breaking Away made the race a movie-house myth, Little Five means to hand the finish line to the riders it once left out.

Tags: Anne Hathaway, casting, David Oyelowo, Ariana Greenblatt, Little Five, Somewhere Pictures