Disclaimer: No matter what you may have gathered from film and television, given the opportunity to sit down in a sterile room opposite a manacled serial killer, chances are very poor that you would be able to get him to share intimate details about his crimes and subtextual lessons about life.
Just because you see things done in scripted form doesn’t mean you can execute them in real life, and just because something was done in real life doesn’t mean it’s going to be transferred believably into scripted form. Oh, and just because something real isn’t transferred believably into scripted form doesn’t necessarily mean the result will be bad.
Black Bird
The Bottom Line A familiar conceit elevated by great performances.
Dennis Lehane’s new six-part drama, Black Bird, is based on James Keene’s memoir In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption. Despite its true-crime trappings, the Apple TV+ adaptation is never especially authentic or convincing on any factual level. It is, however, thoroughly unsettling and anchored by exceptional performances by Paul Walter Hauser, Taron Egerton and Ray Liotta, who collectively more than compensate for myriad flaws of structure and focus.
Our hero is Jimmy Keene (Egerton), a onetime high school football star turned drug dealer. After a bust that also yields illegal firearms, Jimmy is sentenced to 10 years in prison, much to the chagrin of his ex-cop father (Liotta).
Because he’s confident, hunky and a good listener, Jimmy gets an offer from a comely FBI agent (Sepideh Moafi’s Lauren). An accused serial killer (Hauser’s Larry Hall) might be sprung on appeal if somebody doesn’t draw a fuller confession out of him. “Not for all the fucking money in the world,” Jimmy says when it’s suggested he give up his reasonably cushy status in a reasonably relaxed hoosegow to transfer to a different maximum-security prison and go undercover to befriend a guy whose body count might number in the dozens. Lauren emphasizes that he’d be doing it for his freedom, which means a lot after Jimmy’s father has a serious stroke.
A game of moody cat-and-mouse ensues, given added depth by expanding a story that easily could have been told at feature length. Part of that expansion includes regular intercutting to flashbacks featuring Greg Kinnear as Brian Miller, one of the original investigators who put Larry away. The flashbacks give us an introduction to Larry, whose pathology includes sexual perversion, extreme daddy issues and devotion to military reenacting. This background info is dispatched in the first two episodes. Subsequent flashbacks, which sap the intensity of the Jimmy/Larry storyline at every point, are there presumably to remind us that the case involved legitimate police work.
Otherwise, Black Bird would play exclusively as a love letter to Jimmy, so utterly adulatory toward its focal character that it borders on parody. He’s irresistible to men and women alike, so brilliant that he turns porno trading into a lucrative prison business, formerly so great at football that everybody keeps reflecting on how great he was at football. Jimmy, who rarely goes more than 15 or 20 minutes in an episode without doing topless push-ups and sit-ups, is such a force of nature that it seems any institution he goes to tailors its mandatory uniforms to his physique. No matter how uncomfortable the other inhabitants look, Jimmy is ready to walk the runway.
It’s a competition to see which aspect of Jimmy’s storyline — his hollow redemption arc or his brilliant pas de deux with Larry — is least convincing, though it’s probably the one that requires his stern FBI handler to be unable to resist flirting with him. So even though Brian Miller (a real person and not, as I initially assumed, a composite) serves no functional narrative purpose in this miniseries and hasn’t been written in any way that would explain how the series landed an actor of Kinnear’s relative stature, the alternative might have been an ego-driven Jimmy Keene monologue, like an unholy blend of Spalding Gray and Jersey Shore.
My lamenting the pointlessness of what constitutes nearly half the plot of Black Bird, with an added complaint about how little the series has to say about deviant psychology, modern criminal justice or the prison industrial complex — presented here with an almost astounding absence of racial injustice, only superficial abuses of power and a bizarre level of overall hygiene — would give the strong impression that I disliked Black Bird. Mostly that’s not the case.
Egerton does an astonishing job of making Jimmy feel like something resembling a person beyond the hagiography. The full emotional arc that he conveys keeps Jimmy from being completely insufferable — and by all rights, he surely should be. Lehane, along with series directors Michaël R. Roskam, Joe Chappelle and Jim McKay, recognizes that although Jimmy is our eyes and ears, eventually viewers are just going to want to concentrate on the chilling, layered thing that Hauser is doing. In a show nearly devoured by Jimmy Keene’s ego, Egerton deserves some credit for the ultimate lack of ego in his performance.
Hauser, who has very effectively found unnerving vulnerability in real-life figures like Richard Jewell and Shawn Eckardt, presents Larry initially through key external traits like his reedy voice and bushy sideburns. Then he starts digging into both Larry’s pain and the pain he caused. Things become more complicated, raising several hours of questions about how much or how little Jimmy and Larry are playing each other and how this contrived friendship might be filling actual needs for both men. Larry is scary, but he’s at least as sad and pathetic. The series’ running time and Lehane’s reliable gift with dialogue construction are able to showcase both these sides of him. Some of the tantalizing conversations in later episodes are five to 10 minutes of uninterrupted talk and insinuation, great stuff invariably broken up to spend time sitting in a car with Greg Kinnear.
(A fun footnote is that in the same year Hauser achieved career-best reviews for Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, Cameron Britton was excellent in the same role in the anthology series Manhunt, which caused some confusion with Britton’s turn as Ed Kemper in Netflix’s Mindhunter, while Hauser’s performance here and the overall conceit of Black Bird are sure to produce comparisons to Britton and Mindhunter. Mindhunter is much, much better, but Hauser and Britton are both great.)
Black Bird gains a tremendous amount of gravity from one of Liotta’s last screen appearances. Liotta’s death brings additional poignancy to a character who, through failing health and visits to his incarcerated son, is dealing with his own mortality and legacy. There’s a raw immediacy to Liotta’s work here that I’m sure would hit home without the real-life grief. Liotta’s Big Jim is wounded and falling apart, and because he’s miserable about Jimmy’s plight, we sometimes are as well.
I’d add kudos for Moafi, too frequently wasted and yet still far better than her thinly sketched character would require, and Jake McLaughlin, who dominates several scenes as Larry’s protective brother. As for Kinnear, it isn’t that he’s bad. His role is just not a well-integrated part of the story.
Black Bird is methodical (though not as methodical as Mindhunter) in a way that gains power as the show goes along. There are logical leaps related to Jimmy as a character and his unlikely assignment that are easier to put aside as Egerton and Hauser dig deeper and deeper into their characters and their tentative dance. You just have to accept that you’re getting Jimmy Keene’s very filtered perspective on his contributions to this case and that you’re going to want to hit fast-forward every time Kinnear appears. There’s enough good drama here to make that worthwhile.
Source: Hollywood
