Black Bird

Great writing often begets great acting, and the new Apple TV+ limited series “Black Bird” has plenty of both. It’s a genre piece with uncommon depth.

Though it's not perfect — there are some flashbacks that seem a bit out of place — the style and tone, the suspense, and the powerful and emotional performances of Egerton, Hauser, and Liotta in particular, all join together to make Black Bird something truly special.

“Black Bird” is the type of expertly built, thoughtfully crafted drama that makes its seams invisible, so that it’s nearly impossible to point to any one section of the six-hour story and declare it the reason the show is so good. It feels singular moment to moment, yes, but it also has an impressively strong overall impact. ... “Black Bird” tells a great story, and tells it well.

The show’s parallel timelines, including witnessing Jimmy and Larry’s respective childhoods, aren’t a distraction, either. Black Bird uses these storytelling devices to its advantage, letting the suspense simmer just long enough before sucking us back in again.

The performance that will leave audiences as stunned as they are nauseous is courtesy of Paul Walter Hauser as Larry Hall. ... And, of course, there’s Taron Egerton, who commands the camera with a confident stride and shoulders so wide they fill the entire frame.

One of the few recent series that doesn’t distend into unnecessary episodes; it’s fleshed out but compact, brooding but not slow and indulgent, and crystal clear on its themes of redemption and the nature of criminality without being repetitive. ... Egerton and Hauser deliver on all of the script’s promise, both in what they do and don’t say.

This show is worth your time even if you don’t usually buy into the genre. It reminded me more of rich, character-driven material like “The Night Of” than so many of the “ripped from the headlines” mini-series of late. It has the weight of some of Lehane’s best fiction, even though it’s all so disturbingly true.

That “Black Bird” succeeds so well in all of the aforementioned genres [crime thriller, investigative procedural and prison drama] is a tribute to the writing of the masterful Dennis Lehane (author of “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island,” “Gone Baby Gone”) the directing work of Michaël Roskam and Joe Chappelle, the noir-perfect cinematography from Natalie Kingston and one of most outstanding ensemble casts of the year.

You’ll hang on in breathless suspense as Taron Egerton’s convicted drug runner gets a shot at freedom if he can work a confession out of his serial-killer cellmate (a brilliant Paul Walker Hauser). A posthumous Emmy for the great Ray Liotta, as an ex cop, would be poetic justice.

“Black Bird” works quite well as a tense, cat-and-mouse thriller. That it’s a true story adds extra pop to the many dialogue scenes.

This is a tense true-crime story told with immense confidence and care — but it’s the performances, especially from Paul Walter Hauser and Ray Liotta, that really make Black Bird sing.

This is a (very) slow-burn drama, and it takes three of the six episodes for Jimmy and Larry to come face to face. When they do, it’s television magic.

It is when Jimmy and Larry meet up in prison that Black Bird really begins to take flight. Suspicion gives way to tolerance, becomes fragile friendship and then moves on to something much more sinuous and slippery.

Keene’s book has been deftly adapted for television by first-time showrunner Dennis Lehane.

It is expertly acted, smartly scripted and intelligently rendered in nearly all its parts, though these parts are arranged in sometimes confusing order, switching between time periods and between Keene’s journey and the murder and missing persons investigations pursued by Kinnear’s straight-arrow detective, an oasis of normalcy in the moral muck and mire.

A taut true-crime tale, Black Bird delivers a tense and mostly compelling game of cat and mouse, finding a new avenue into the well-worn world of serial killers via a jailhouse informant desperate to uncover information to commute his sentence. Featuring one of the late Ray Liotta's final performances, the result is a limited series that doesn't neatly follow the traditional script.

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.

[Dennis Lehane] made Mr. Keene's nonfiction into something novelistic, with all the action, ironies and unlikely happenstance one might expect.

Egerton’s characterisation stops short of real likeability, but he’s good in scenes where Keene shows his vulnerabilities and struggles to cover up his nerves. The more impressive performance here is from Paul Walter Hauser as Hall. ... There is some cat-and-mouse flirting with a female FBI agent (Sepideh Moafi) that feels extraneous, but otherwise the writing draws us in.

Hauser doesn’t set out to overwhelm. In fact, his monster is all the more scary because he’s so low key and obviously demented. But he has so much there that all else seems commonplace.

A taut, well-cast and beautifully structured limited series that pulls us in and doesn’t let go.

The humanity Liotta brings to Keene’s father, Big Jim, is multifaceted and sobering, and it cuts through the more irritating aspects of Black Bird to remind what a great actor can do with any amount of screen time.

It’s certainly intentional that Hauser’s Hall is a seductive character, but Lehane probably didn’t intend for our interest, and even our sympathies, to tilt so completely in his direction. Despite that imbalance in the dramatic weight, “Black Bird” is mostly engaging - Hauser is onscreen a lot, and the production has a hushed quality, with occasional expressionistic touches, that is reminiscent of David Fincher’s crime stories.

The show is at its strongest when it allows Egerton to express the vulnerability, pain, and fear that exist under an exterior of unflappable charisma and ability. ... Still, as a frame for a gifted young star, “Black Bird” is serviceable and solidly built; its resolute unsurprisingness, after some very early fireworks, goes from frustrating to serenely comfortable as the hours wear on.

Black Bird competently, if not always vibrantly, explores the delicate relationship between criminality and culpability, but its sleek, mechanical presentation begs for a little more grit to match its cast’s soulful performances.

Black Bird has enough interesting performances and just enough of an intriguing story to smooth over some its more generic and cliched parts. Lets hope the rough patches smooth out as the story goes along.

Hauser, the show’s standout, presents a terrifyingly shrewd version of his screen type as a darkly comic bungler (as seen in “I, Tonya” and “BlacKkKlansman”). Unfortunately, the drama’s other half — Jimmy’s descent into the hell of an institution for the “criminally insane” and forced bond with a monster that makes him confront long-repressed memories of his own violence-filled childhood — is too by-the-numbers to be emotionally engaging.