With a post-Breaking Bad Bryan Cranston in the lead role and a storyline that delves into the worst excesses of the anti-communist McCarthy era, the biopic Trumbo always had the potential for awards-season success. Now distributor Bleecker Street has confirmed the film will get a US theatrical release in the autumn, timing which suggests it is being pitched for a run at the 2016 Oscars.

Directed by The Campaign’s Jay Roach and also starring Helen Mirren, Elle Fanning and John Goodman, Trumbo is based on a screenplay by John McNamara, adapted from the 1977 book Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook. It centres on the battles between Trumbo and notorious anti-red Los Angeles Times Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) over words and freedom during a period of heightened fear over Soviet influence in the US.

Trumbo (to be played by Cranston) was jailed for 11 months in 1947 after refusing to cooperate with the anti-communist congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities. Once free, he found himself persona non grata in Hollywood as a result of the purge on supposed communist sympathisers that ran from the late 1940s to the late 1950s.

Trumbo continued to write under pseudonyms, his work as “Robert Rich” on 1956’s The Brave One even garlanded with an Oscar, which Trumbo was unable to collect until 1975. He was named in 1960 by actor Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger as the true screenwriter of Spartacus and Exodus in a brave move that effectively broke the blacklist. But like many of the “Hollywood 10” targeted by anti-communists, his career never truly recovered, despite the effective end of ill-treatment towards leftwing figures within the US film industry from the 1960s onwards. Hopper, for her part, once exhorted her readers not to go and see Spartacus because it was “written by a commie”. The swords-and-sandals epic was nevertheless a huge hit at the US box office, won four Oscars and became the most profitable film in Universal Studio’s history.

As late as 1993, Trumbo was recognised posthumously by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the true screenwriter of 1953’s Oscar-winning Roman Holiday. He had died in 1976 of a heart attack in Los Angeles, aged 70.

Cranston is best known for his celebrated turn as chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White in Breaking Bad, but has shifted to the big screen in mainstream fare such as Godzilla since the end of the series.

Trumbo is due to hit US cinemas on 6 November.