After coming out of pretty much nowhere to win an Oscar for her Juno screenplay in 2008, Diablo Cody has been laying relatively low-- her follow-up screenplay Jennifer's Body became a hugely underseen film, and her show The United States of Tara ran on Showtime for three successful but low-key seasons before being cancelled earlier this year. But this fall Cody will be back to the big screen with what's looking like a likely Oscar run for Young Adult, directed by Jason Reitman, and she's also gearing up to make her directorial debut on Lamb of God, based on her own screenplay.

The initial announcement of the project didn't tell us much about the plot, but now a rumor from Twitch has started shedding light on the situation they report that Russell Brand has been offered the male lead in the film, and that Dancing With the Stars and upcoming Footloose star Julianne Hough is a top choice to play the female lead. Over at The Playlist they've read the script and say the plot kicks off when the main character, a young Christian girl named Lamb, survives a plane crash but loses her faith. She travels to Vegas and befriends a craps dealer and a bartender, the character that recovered alcoholic Brand would play. Between his raucous Get Him to the Greek character and the alcoholic in Arthur, this guy sure can't stay sober onscreen.

It's unclear when production on Lamb of God might start, though I imagine it has to be after Cody is done doing the publicity circuit for Young Adult this fall. I like the idea of Brand hopping on board a project that's a little different, though, and also not entirely about his personality. Since breaking out for U.S. audiences in Forgetting Sarah Marshall he's really just been playing various incarnations of his public persona, whether in the spinoff Greek or even as the voice of an energetic animated bunny in Hop. But Cody's name will be the big one on Lamb of God, and it might be nice to see Brand recede back into part of an ensemble.