Black Bird: Creepy, But Facile Series About a Jock and his Serial Killer Buddy

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Creepy, sometimes facile and eminently bingeable, the new six-part AppleTV+ series, Black Bird, unfolds like a nightmare version of Barry Levinson’s 1985 Rain Man, in which Tom Cruise tried to wrest the family fortune from his autistic brother (Dustin Hoffman).

 In this drawn-from-real-life version, the cocky hustler is James “Jimmy” Keene (Taron Egerton), who has a selfish motive to befriend a socially backward misfit, Larry DeWayne Hall (Paul Walter Hauser). Though the plot involves long jail sentences and gruesome murders.

Taron Edgerton (right) is reluctant new best friends with fellow convict/serial killer Paul Walter Hauser

Black Bird, which was developed by crime writer Dennis Lehane (Shutter Island,, Mystic River) from James Keene’s 2010 memoir, In With the Devil. The hustler, in this case, is a glib playboy doing a ten-year prison stretch on a drug-dealing charge.

Jimmy Keene was a star athlete in high school and a popular student in the ‘80s, but he turned to drug dealing on a large scale in the next decade to impress his rich friends.

A few years out of school, he was arrested and sentenced to a 10-year stretch to the disappointment of his loving, ex-cop father, Big Jim (Ray Liotta in his final role.)

Then, a few months into his jail time, Jimmy got a chance at a reprieve. He was approached by the local prosecutor and a woman FBI agent, Lauren (The Deuce’s Sepideh Moafi) with a proposal.

An accused serial killer (Hauser’s Larry Hall) might be sprung on appeal if somebody doesn’t get a confession from him.  When his dad has a stroke, Jimmy nervously decides he’ll take the deal.

One thing that immediately rings odd is the weirdly aggressive flirtation between Lauren and Jimmy, with the kind of pseudo-clever, inauthentic dialogue you associate with TV cop shows. In this case, it’s a case of the script pushing thematic connections ahead of credible behaviour.

In an earlier scene, we see Jimmy casually pick up a waitress and later, ample muscles on display, pumping away aerobically behind the gasping woman while he looks faintly bored. 

The idea, presumably, is to establish his ego-centric sexual magnetism, and perhaps set the groundwork for an implicit connection between serial seducer to serial killer.

But Egerton, who played Elton John in Rocketman, comes across as too introverted and sensitive to sell the part. In a later scene, when a jail house shrink notes that Keene is “very charismatic” we’re inclined to respond, “If you say so.”

The idea that it takes a predator to catch one isn’t entirely wasted. And at its best moments, Black Bird recalls David Fincher’s hair-raising Netflix series Mindhunter, about weird FBI agents developing serial killer profiling in the ‘70s.  Although Black Bird focuses on just one creepy killer, who, in this case, is a doozy. 

 The highpoint of the series is emphatically the performance by Hauser, a comedian and actor who plays schlubby fall guys exceptionally well (he was one of the goons in I, Tonya and starred in Clint Eastwood’s  legal thriller, Richard Jewell).

Here, he sports a pair of mutton chops (Hall was obsessed with Civil War re-enactments) and with his childlike voice, odd humour and vulnerable manner, he’s like a Muppet figure, whose company Keene begins to enjoy, at least, until he gets closer to him.

In the later episodes, Egerton is given more interesting dramatic heavy-lifting, reacting, and adjusting his relationship, with each new discovery. In the fourth and best episode, the two men bond during the cleanup after a bloody riot. Keene begins to learn about Hall’s actions and world view and experiences a kind of moral vertigo.

Part of what makes Black Bird easily bingeable is that it’s not so intense or complex to require breaks.

Still, one wishes Black Bird would get where it needs to go more efficiently. Keene’s memoir has been bruited about for several years as a possible feature movie, which would be the reasonable running time for this story.

Part of the narrative expansion includes a flashback subplot featuring Greg Kinnear as Brian Miller, one of the original investigators who put Larry away. An additional fictional dilemma sees Keene struggling with a sociopathic guard who threatens to extort Jimmy as a snitch, and includes the real-life enforced friendship between Jimmy, and mobster Vincent Gigante (Tony Amendola), a real-life Mafia don famous for faking dementia while running his crime empire.

All of this is carried off with professional polish but no great sense of necessity. 

In a prison movie, the last thing you want is the sense that your time is being wasted.

Black Bird. Developed by Denis Lehane. Starring: Taron Egerton, Paul Walter Hauser, Greg Kinnear, Sepideh Moafi and Ray Liotta. Black Bird will launch its first two episodes on Friday, July 8, 2022 on Apple TV+, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday.