Ray Liotta perfectly cast in final TV performance for ‘Black Bird’
Every episode of “Black Bird” begins with the legend, “The following is inspired by a true story.”
These days, TV shows inspired by true stories are a dime a dozen; the cachet attached to something that “really happened,” if not exactly as represented by actors speaking invented dialogue, can be a valuable promotional tool.
In this case, however, the notice feels almost necessary, given that the story seems a little nutty even once you’ve verified the basic facts. While there has evidently been some arrangement of events and sculpting of characters for purposes of dramatic emphasis, the strange basics are true enough: In the 1990s, Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton), serving a sentence for drug dealing, did go undercover in a prison for the criminally insane in an attempt to elicit incriminating information from suspected serial killer and convicted kidnapper Larry Hall
(Paul Walter Hauser), with the promise that success would lead to his freedom.
That the series begins with narration from Keene, about the butterfly effect which will tie his life to that of a young girl seen riding a bicycle through a cornfield, plays almost as an homage to “Goodfellas,” whose star, the late Ray Liotta, plays Keene’s beloved if problematic father — a former, perhaps slightly bent policeman.
Sentenced to 10 years, while expecting less, Keene is approached after several months by Edmund Beaumont (Robert Wisdom), the prosecutor who put him away, with the aforementioned proposition: Transfer to another prison, get
close to Hall, get him to say where the bodies are buried and go free. The authorities are concerned that Hall, whose appeal has been granted, may be released from prison and kill again, inserting a ticking clock into the story. There is some hemming and hawing on Keene’s part and semiantagonistic flirty banter with federal agent Lauren McCauley (Sepideh Moafi), who is looking for the sliver of misogyny that Keene might use to connect with Hall. Having passed McCauley’s “audition,” Keene then finds himself in the United States Medical Facility for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
Developed by Dennis Lehane, the show is expertly acted, smartly scripted and intelligently rendered in nearly all its parts, though these parts are arranged in sometimes confusing order. There are digressions as well, including a rather moving sequence recounting a victim’s life and compareand-contrast flashbacks to the childhoods of Keene and Hall.
There is some room provided to wonder whether Hall is actually guilty, but one never actually doubts it. Serial killers are dramatically limited;
they have a single motivation and nowhere to go as characters. But Lehane and Hauser get a surprising lot out of Hall, with speeches that, while not making him out to be an evil genius, are not devoid of insight or poetry. Enough of them are also disgusting, which is the axis on which Keene will turn from a person who cares mostly about himself into a man with a conscience.
Beyond the remarkable subject matter, Liotta’s presence — in the first of his posthumous screen appearances — is what makes the series more than usually noteworthy. He’s an old lion playing an old lion, still trying to do right by his son and somehow failing and spending much of the series diminished by health problems — a shadow even of the self we meet in his opening scenes, and certainly in Keene’s memory. Above all, there is that singular, inborn mix of the rough and the sweet, a softness to his voice, his eyes, that from “Something Wild” on has provided a sort of complicating countermelody to the darker aspects of his less savory roles. That 30 years ago, he could have played the son makes him perfect casting for the father.
How to watch: