Mullen makes drummer-to-drama move

Larry Mullen Jr, drummer with U2, is to make his acting debut in a remake of Patrice Leconte's 2002 French drama Man on the Train.

Mullen plays a sombre hoodlum who, after arriving in a small town, makes friends with an elderly teacher and starts to envy the man's sedate lot.

In a neat reversal, the teacher, played by Donald Sutherland, comes to warm to the life of a desperado. Mullen takes a role played by Johnny Hallyday, creased French pop star, in Leconte's admired original film. The comparison is not entirely flattering to the U2 star.

Regarded with some derision outside France, Hallyday was over a decade older than Mullen (49), when he essayed the part.

Man on the Train is directed by the Irish film-maker Mary McGuckian, who, over the past few decades, has delivered such star-studded – though very modestly successful – films such as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Rag Tale and Inconceivable. Mullen is listed as a co-producer on the project and the drummer also helped compose the soundtrack with Simon Climie, formerly of 1980s pop group Climie Fisher.

Though U2 have appeared in two documentaries – Rattle and Hum and U2-3D – and Bono recently acted in the strange Beatles musical Across the Universe, the band members have to date shown little enthusiasm for a move into acting.

Man on the Train will be one of a vast huddle of films vying for distributors' attentions at the market in next month's Cannes Film Festival.

Two Irish films will be competing in prestigious competitions at the event. Paolo Sorrentino's This Must be the Place, supported by the Irish Film Board and co-produced by Element Pictures, a Dublin based company, has secured a place in the main competition.

Rebecca Daly's The Other Side of Sleep will be playing in the highly prestigious Director's Fortnight sidebar.

Sorrentino's film, starring Sean Penn as an aging rock star in search of a Nazi war criminal, will be up against new work from such admired film-makers as Pedro Almodóvar, Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick in the race for the
Palme d'Or.

Ms Daly, whose debut feature is an offbeat thriller concerning a habitual sleepwalker, becomes the first female Irish director to compete for the Caméra d'Or, awarded for the best first film. The festival runs from May 11th to May 23rd.