Casting Call: Just Kids

In which we suggest who should star in the next big adaptation, remake, or historical film.

Patti Smith is preparing to conquer a new medium. This week, Deadline announced that the legendary punk rocker is adapting Just Kids, her National Book Award-winning memoir about life in New York in the ’60s and ’70s, into a feature film. Smith will be writing the script with John Logan, whose screenplays for both Gladiator (2000) and The Aviator (2004) were nominated for Academy Awards; in 2010, his stage saga about Mark Rothko also won the Tony for Best Play. 

Just Kids focuses mainly on Smith’s relationship with groundbreaking photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; the two met when they were 19 and 20 years old, respectively, and remained incredibly close even after Mapplethorpe realized that he was gay. Which young stars should play these counterculture celebrities, as well as their equally well-known friends and lovers (Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg, to name a few)? Here’s who we have in mind.