Black Bird review: A moderately engaging study of the misogyny that turns men into monsters

One of the persistent issues that plagues a lot of the miniseries nowadays is they feel like feature-length movies that were gratuitously inflated. Why? Because selling them to picky movie studios may have been harder than selling them to easy-to-please streamers. Nevertheless, in this era of prestige TV, the creators still have grand cinematic ambitions. In accordance with these ambitions, they pad out episodes that should be around 40 odd minutes to an hour or longer. The latest example of a show in dire need of a haircut is Black Bird, now streaming on Apple TV+.

What could have been a neat two-hour crime drama is instead a six-hour miniseries. Dennis Lehane, whose novels (Mystic River, Shutter Island, Gone, Baby, Gone) have been adapted into acclaimed movies in the recent past, now adapts Jimmy Keene’s prison memoir In with the Devil into a moderately engaging cat-and-mouse tale of two criminals. One is Keene himself, played by Taron Egerton, who comes fresh off his Golden Globe-winning role as Elton John in the musical biopic Rocketman. Keene is a once football star and now convicted drug dealer who’s given a get-out-of-jail-free card. Terms and Conditions indeed apply. In exchange, he must use his disarming charms to coax a confession out of suspected serial killer Larry Hill, played by Paul Walter Hauser. While Jimmy attempts to get chummy with Larry inside their maximum-security prison so as to get him talking about the murders and the locations of the buried bodies, local detective Brian Miller (Greg Kinnear) and FBI agent Lauren McCauley (Sepideh Moafi) look for evidence on the outside so Larry doesn’t walk free on appeal.

What confounds the detectives and the viewers is: if Larry is a single offender with a pathological desire for notoriety that being a serial offender brings, if he is a developmentally disabled man whose fuzzy grasp on reality leaves him unable to separate it from dreams, or if he is a serial confessor, a crafty one at that, mixing truth and lies to muddy the waters to a degree where the investigators themselves are rendered unsure if he is a murderer to begin with. The tension lies in the confusion, employed to calculative effect by Hauser as Larry, whose silence alone speaks volumes.

Over the course of six long episodes, the narrative parcelled out between Jimmy-Larry bonding sessions and Brian-Lauren’s investigation often ends up circling itself into a tangle. The unhurried pacing not only robs the story of its urgency, but also weakens the precarious dynamics at play in a study in contrasts of what makes criminals. In the more revealing conversations between Jimmy and Larry, we get a portrait of their different upbringings. Jimmy was the son of a cop (an ever-enthralling Ray Liotta in one of his final roles) and grew up in a suburban home. Larry was the son of a gravedigger and grew up next to a cemetery. Jimmy’s dad was the kind of man who had time to play catch with his son even after he pulled a 12-hour shift. Larry’s dad was the kind of man who enlisted his son to rob the jewellery of the people he buried.

Indeed, Jimmy grew up around a different kind of domestic trouble with two parents arguing all the time. He was destined to become a football star before it all went wrong. On being busted for slinging cocaine and possessing illegal firearms, he is sentenced to 10 years with no possibility of parole. A few months into the sentence, Lauren and the district attorney offer him a chance to walk out a lot earlier if he can get Larry telling the truth and convicted on more murder charges. To do so, Jimmy must move to a maximum-security prison where Larry is soon about to be released on appeal. If Jimmy reluctantly agrees, the show suggests it’s less because of any Good Samaritan intentions, more because of his concern for the health of his father who has suffered a stroke. Why Jimmy is chosen is because they believe he’s got the sociable personality that can gain Larry’s trust without too much hassle. Though Egerton conveys Jimmy’s cockiness effectively, he can’t quite sell us on his supposed smooth-talking charms.

Though all the FBI have is one body, they have reason to believe Larry may be behind as many as 14 murders of young girls across the Midwest. Well before his arrest for the murder of a 15-year old girl, Larry had already gained a reputation as a serial confessor so much so that the local police department refused to believe he had committed any murders in the first place. They assert he is just a harmless eccentric with a love for Civil War re-enactments and burnsides (not sideburns, he insists). His twin brother asserts Larry was coerced into a false confession, a scene which the show frames with a measured ambivalence.

Beneath Larry’s soft-spoken demeanour lies an incel-like resentment which manifests itself in the more nauseating confessions he makes to Jimmy. Hauser conveys the deep-rooted loathing of a dissatisfied man who feels entitled to sex as if it were a basic human right denied to him by women. It’s an unsettling performance that strikes a delicate balance of casual misogyny and mindful impenetrability. Though he obviously doesn’t self-identify as an incel (it’s a very 21st century term), the repugnant ideology becomes clear in the way he talks about women. In the penultimate episode, the show attempts to give a voice to the victim by having her character describe the life she enjoyed before Larry robbed her of a future. But this feels like an afterthought, a retrospective measure taken to counteract potential accusations of treating a real-life victim as just another dead girl in a true-crime series.

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The more Jimmy and Larry talk, the more Jimmy becomes convinced Larry is a killer. The role of playing sounding board and spending every day with such darkness takes its toll on Jimmy, who is forced to indulge Larry’s locker-room talk and maintain a poker face to keep him talking. After a particularly disturbing conversation where Larry reveals horrifying details of how he killed a young girl, he goes back to his cell and cries in shock. The problem for Jimmy is two-fold: collecting key details only a killer could know, and determining the locations of the other victims’ bodies. Complicating things is figuring out if Larry is telling the truth or not. With the camera fixed on the two in these lengthy conversations, the viewer sits in anticipation, waiting for Larry to slip up and drop his facade. When he does though, the feeling is less of relief, more of horror.

The first two episodes of Black Bird release on Apple TV+ on 8 July, with a new episode to follow every Friday.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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