EXCLUSIVE: Blake Lively has been set for Bruised, a mixed marital arts action-drama directed by The Notebook and My Sister’s Keeper helmer Nick Cassavetes. Nick Meyer’s Sierra/Affinity is launching sales on the project to foreign buyers in Cannes this week.

Lively will play Jackie, a single mother working two jobs and a disgraced MMA fighter who has been up against the ropes her entire life. When the authorities threaten to take her young son away from her, she must get back in the cage for one last chance to fight for redemption and give her son the life she always wanted.

Michelle Rosenfarb writes the script while Thunder Road Pictures’ Basil Iwanyk will produce with Linda Gottlieb and Guymon Casady of Management 360. Project is eyeing a September start of shoot.

Lively is coming off the back of last year’s box office hit The Shallows, which took $119 million globally. In that film she played a young woman grieving the loss of her mother who goes surfing off a secluded beach only to find herself in the feeding ground of a Great White shark. Jaume Collet-Serra directed and it was produced by Lynn Harris and Matti Leshem. She also starred in last year’s Woody Allen title Café Society with Steve Carell, Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, which opened the Cannes fest last year.

Lively and Cassavetes are repped by WME, and Lively’s managed by Management 360.