The first trailer for crime thriller Nightcrawler features Jake Gyllenhaal as aspiring journalist Lou Bloom.

'Nightcrawler' Trailer

Gyllenhaal’s Lou reeks of ambition, desperate to – and believing himself capable of – becoming a top TV journalist. When he makes the move to Los Angeles, he finds himself fast becoming entrenched in the city’s crime world and begins to work as a freelance journalist covering the underground goings on. In the process, Lou himself gets dragged into the morally corrupt system.

“If you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy the ticket,” is Lou’s motto, which is often repeated in the trailer. The stakes seem to rise higher and higher for Lou, whose desire to succeed gets more and more frantic in the snippets of the minute-and-a-half first look.

In order to play Lou, a man hungry for journalistic success, Gyllenhaal opted to shed 20 pounds to give himself a leaner look. "I knew that [Lou] was literally and figuratively hungry," Gyllenhaal told Us Weekly, adding that he wanted to get into a "mode where I was always a bit hungry."

Nightcrawler will bow Oct. 17, 2014.

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