New trailer reveals the high stakes in Daveed Diggs' Blindspotting

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With three days left on his probation, the stakes are high for Collin (Daveed Diggs) to stay out of trouble, but as the latest trailer for new movie Blindspotting shows, trouble can always be found in Oakland.

The exclusive trailer above opens on Collin and Miles (Rafael Casal) sitting in their friend’s souped-up car when Collin discovers guns hidden in it. Knowing he’ll be put in jail if he’s caught with a gun, Collin tries to get his friends to let him out the car, but they ignore him and Miles purchases one of the guns instead.

The car sequence was inspired by a true story Casal said he experienced while sitting in a car with his friends as they played around with guns.

“It’s a story from my life … and that’s something that my friends were doing in the car that I was in, except that I didn’t have the reaction that Collin had,” Casal tells EW. “At that point, it was so normal.”

Blindspotting, penned by Diggs and Casal and inspired by their childhood and friendship growing up in Oakland, combines spit-fire rap verses into a story that spars between sharp comedy and heart-wrenching drama.

As Collin tries to get through his final three days of probation, guns constantly crop up around him. When he witnesses a police officer shoot an unarmed black man in the back despite the man shouting “don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” he finds himself facing the guilt of being helpless in the situation and of being alive when so many of his Oakland brethren have been less lucky.

“The way the film interacts with the debate around gun control is the same way that I think it’s interacting with all of the debates, which is ‘here’s a thing that happens, like, here’s guns in the real world and here’s things that happen when they’re around,’ and then I expect everybody would draw their own conclusion,” Diggs explains.

Casal adds, “Because it’s a reality, we don’t even need to make a statement about it, we just point it out and say, ‘if you feel uncomfortable by this, then you may have an opinion about the gun debate and you should explore that.’”

The duo’s use of rap within their dialogue also helps convey the film’s larger themes of race, identity, adulthood, friendship, and a community contending with gentrification.

When Collin and Miles “express something that is heavy and layered, what better way to do it than in these condensed metaphors and really great punch lines that with more viewings, you get more and more out of,” says Casal.

Lionsgate’s Blindspotting hits theaters on July 20. Watch the film’s new trailer above.