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Aaron Sorkin, Jessica Chastain and Cast on the
‘Molly’s Game’ Red Carpet in New York City

December 2017 – New York City: MOLLY’S GAME is a true crime drama starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba about Molly Bloom, a young woman who ran high-stake underground poker games that attracted high-profile Hollywood stars and wealthy criminals and eventually got her into trouble with the law. MOLLY’S GAME is well written, marking Aaron Sorkin’s long overdue directorial debut.


Playing Molly, Jessica Chastain narrates much of the story. She begins by explaining her childhood as a competitive mogul skier and her very demanding psychiatrist father, played by Kevin Costner. While competing to make the Olympics, Molly suffers a terrible crash that takes her out of the competition.


Cut to years later. The FBI arrests Molly for her previous involvement in underground poker games and the criminals that came to play poker. Told to show up in New York City in two days with a lawyer, Molly finds attorney Charlie Jaffey, played by Idris Elba, a “by the book” straight-laced, expensive lawyer. Molly has no money, since the government confiscated all of it two years before, so she has nothing to offer Charlie.

On a whim, however, Charlie takes her case. After Molly had been busted by the government, she wrote a book detailing her life running underground poker games with high-profile people, but Charlie tells her he needs to hear her full story with no details left out.


Molly explains that, after her ski competition crash, she moved away from her family and lived in Los Angeles for a time, planning to go to law school. In Los Angeles, Molly too a waitress job and eventually landed a spot working as a personal assistant for Dean, a mean spirited real estate agent. Dean also ran an underground poker game that included some A-list Hollywood actors, directors and other wealthy businessmen. Dean made Molly the hostess of the poker game. Knowing nothing about poker, Molly watched everything very intently and began learning the ins and outs of poker and gambling. At the end of her first night of poker, Molly made $3,000 in tips.


It doesn’t take long before Molly and Dean don’t work well together. So, Molly takes everything she learned by hosting the poker games, steals all the players from Dean and hosts her own underground poker. This works out well for a time, but eventually all the players leave her.


Not wanting to give up, Molly moves to New York City, where she starts from scratch. She hires some high-end prostitutes to get the word out to their super wealthy clients about a new poker room she’s running. It doesn’t take long before her games are highly coveted. All the while, Molly chooses to do everything legally. She doesn’t charge players to be there, she doesn’t skim from the table, and for those who can’t afford to pay money they owe, Molly doesn’t have “muscle” go after them. Molly actually tries to look out for the players that come in to play poker.


However, keeping this up eventually pushes Molly into drug use and addiction. Also, when the stakes get really high, she begins skimming from the table illegally. When the Russian mob find their way at her table and her personal sanity begins to suffer, the FBI storms in and confiscates everything Molly owns.