Christian Bale’s latest crime drama for Netflix, The Pale Blue Eye is from writer/director Scott Cooper.

The movie follows behind the latest trend in Hollywood of making larger-than-life biopics, loosely based on real life people. Sometimes the movies go beyond and venture into crossover tales, The Pale Blue Eye is one such movie.

According to What’s on Netflix, Scott Cooper adapted the movie from Louis Bayard’s historical fiction novel of the same name. Cooper has drafted many versions of the screenplay over the years.

Christian Bale plays a local detective Augustus Landor on the grounds of the West Point Military Academy on the western bank of the Hudson River in New York.  He is brought in to investigate the mysterious death of one of the Academy’s cadets.

In order to crack the complex case, he enlists the help of an eager yet eccentric cadet named Edgar Allan Poe, played by Harry Potter & The Ballad of Buster Scruggs star Harry Melling.

Although Bale is the lead in the movie, it is described as an “Edgar Allan Poe Origin Story” that has “the themes that ultimately influence (the) young unformed writer to become the writer he became.”

Just like the 2012 Poe-centric film The Raven, The Pale Blue Eye is filled with references to Poe’s literary work and details of his personal life.

Melling & Cooper’s presents Poe as “a scrawny intellectual who has been battered & bullied by his peers most of his life; A tortured alcoholic with a poet’s soul that seeks the level of attention & admiration his late mother bestowed upon him during his childhood.”