Music Box Films has purchased all U.S. rights to “A Quiet Passion,” a biopic about Emily Dickinson that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. It plans to release the film during the first quarter of 2017.

The film stars Cynthia Nixon as the poet, who lived a life without renown, her work largely unpublished until after her death. Jennifer Ehle, Keith Carradine, and Duncan Duff co-star, with Terence Davies, the acclaimed English director of “House of Mirth” and “Of Time and the City,” sliding behind the camera.

Variety critic Guy Lodge seemed unmoved by the film, writing, “Emily Dickinson’s poetry trumps Terence Davies’ scripting in this heavily mannered, strangely semi-comic biopic.” But others embraced the picture, with The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver writing that the film “… overcomes the challenge of [Dickinson’s] closed, interior life, with the help of a great performance by Cynthia Nixon.”

The US deal was negotiated by Nick Shumaker of UTA representing the producers and Music Box Films president William Schopf.

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Music Box Films had previously released Davies’ “The Deep Blue Sea,” which it acquired out of Toronto in 2011.

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