Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks Team Up Against Nixon in 'The Post' Trailer

On Tuesday, we finally got our first look at the first trailer for Steven Spielberg's upcoming Pentagon Papers thriller, The Post, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in a story about a newspaper's fight against a president who tried to silence the press.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the film follows the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak, where thousands of pages of government documents regarding the scope of the Vietnam War were shared with the New York Times. The documents showed that the US government had engineered a massive coverup about the extent of the war over the course of three decades. President Nixon responded by barring the Times from publishing stories about them.

Spielberg's film focuses on the Washington Post's role in the scandal, following the paper's first female publisher Kay Graham (Streep), its executive editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), and journalist Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) as they weigh the threat of prison time with the obligation of exposing the truth. The trailer also features appearances from its all-star cast, including Alison Brie, David Cross, Sarah Paulson, and Bradley Whitford, whose character continually tests Graham's "resolve" to run the paper as a woman.

Like 2015's Spotlight, The Post hits on the importance of journalism and press freedom at a time when the US president claims to have coined the term "fake news." But it also follows a woman fighting to stand her ground as a professional in an industry typically run by men, another topic that seems all too familiar even in 2017.

Give the trailer a watch above, and catch Steven Spielberg's The Post when it hits theaters on December 22.