BLACK BIRD, BLACK BIRD

HAUSER SLOWLY BUILDS COMPLICATED PRISON BIRD CHARACTER STUDY

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

When Jimmy Keene finally gets busted for cocaine trafficking in a police drug sweep, everything gets just a little bit worse than what he has been told to expect from prison.

Writer Riccardo DiLoreto intertwines Keene’s prison narrative with a police multiple murder investigation and a second narrative about the murder suspect behind bars.

Taron Egerton plays Jimmy Keene who is transferred to a high security prison as an informant meant to befriend the murder suspect and obtain information from him about his crimes.

Paul Walter Hauser plays murder suspect Larry Hall. Hauser also played Atlanta bombing suspect Richard Jewell in the biopic about the Olympic bombing investigation, Richard Jewell (2019). And Hauser played one of the suspects in I, Tonya (2017) starring Margot Robbie.

Hall spends time in the prison while the police try to find enough evidence about the disappearance of young girls to keep him behind bars.

Egerton plays Keene as this big charismatic older brother type fella that Hall would naturally glam to.

The information does not come too quickly though as Larry makes friends in prison as a handy man fixing the aging, neglected prison operational system, such as the big garbage machine. But slowly the two jail birds begin to share secret stories about their life before prison.

DiLoreto uses the intertwining narratives so that not every scene is shot inside the prison.

Greg Kinnear and Sepideh Moafi play the FBI agents revisiting the tracks the local police dismissed as too inconclusive to follow up on. This narrative becomes compelling as initially Brian Miller must convince everyone including himself that there is more to the suspect than an attention seeking false confessor. Miller finds new angles for the investigation, and pieces do begin to fall together to establish a connection between a crime scene and a suspect.

Ray Liotta plays Jimmy’s father, just living on the outside as a retired police officer waiting for his son’s release.

Younger versions of some of the actors are also used for the back story that shows the young girls gone missing, and the rough childhood that may have caused the suspects homicidal ideations.

The camera continually returns to the prison scenes though as Jimmy and Larry share some life stories. Hauser shows how Larry was easy to please in his relationship with the prison staff, but then he has been showing them only a thin outer shell that quickly gives way to some inner weirdness and a somewhat off world view.

Hauser does a good job developing a real prison character, with a few twitches and narcissistic compulsions. But the entire series does not depend on Hauser’s performance. 

Kinnear becomes this sincere hard working crime investigator while Egerton must bend the high rolling drug trafficker persona to something more nearer the murder suspect to whom Larry can relate to and eventually share dirty secrets with.

These character studies develop slowly from episode to episode, creating a bit of exasperation between scenes in the process because only enough new character is revealed to get you to stay tuned in to the scene and then return for the next episode.

Black Bird is an original Apple production currently streaming on Apple TV+.