Sean Penn and Ryan Gosling offered parts in Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad

GANGSTER SQUAD (formerly TALES FROM THE GANGSTER SQUAD), the hot Will Beall-scripted crime drama from ZOMBIELAND director Ruben Fleischer, has just received a greenlight from Warner Bros. And now, formal offers have reportedly gone out to both Sean Penn (THE TREE OF LIFE) and Ryan Gosling (THE IDES OF MARCH) to take on two of the film’s principal leads.

Penn’s been offered the role of Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, while Gosling is up for the part of an L.A.P.D. cop tasked with bringing him down. According to Deadline, the drama – based on a series of articles by L.A. Times writer Paul Lieberman – “is the fact-based tale of the crime fighting exploits of a squad of elite Los Angeles officers in the 1940s charged with stopping [Cohen] and other mobsters.” Cohen, a former boxer and associate of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, was known as a smooth charmer as well as a sociopath who enjoyed dabbling in sex and extortion. As mentioned, the film comes written by Will Beall, a former South Central Los Angeles officer who’s also behind the gritty gangland novel L.A. Rex.

Before taking it to the streets though, director Ruben Fleischer will later this summer unspool for us the action-comedy 30 MINUTES OR LESS, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson, Fred Ward, and Michael Peña.