Old West’s boys and their toys

A new docudrama from Robert Redford features familiar stars and a sense of play.

The Robert Redford-produced “American West” is like a reenactors’ camp.

“The American West,” which premieres Saturday on AMC, is an eight-part docudrama about America between the Missouri River and Pacific Ocean from the end of the Civil War to 1890.

It is not a new story, of course: Ken Burns already put his lavish, quasi-final documentary stamp on it in the 1996, nine-part “The West.”

And the characters highlighted in its opening credits — Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Gen. George Custer, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull — have been stars or bit players in countless other documentaries and dramas. They are the warring gods of our homegrown mythology.

What’s fresh in this retelling, produced by Robert Redford, is the degree to which it has gone in for recreation as opposed to documentation, and the fact that it has drafted movie cowboys, including Tom Selleck, Kiefer Sutherland, Danny Glover, Burt Reynolds and Redford himself, as talkinghead commentators alongside the customary scholars. There is a smattering of period ephemera, but we never see a photograph of James or Custer or Sitting Bull, only the actors made up to play them.

With dialogue that might have been whipped together for a middle-school project, it’s more dress-up than drama, more reenactment than documentary — “America’s Most Western.” General (later President) Ulysses S. Grant, though often seen, has so little to say I thought perhaps the actor playing him didn’t speak English; he’s represented mostly in a state of tired contemplation, staring ruefully into the middle distance. Others have more to do, but not that much more.

If the series’ knit-brow seriousness sometimes reads as a parody of seriousness, it also gives it a sense of play; of boys, which is to say men, running around the forest with guns. (I don’t mean that in its disfavor; it’s what makes it fun, even if fun was not the point.) And it does tease out and knit together themes that can get jumbled up in our fuzzy, fantasy-fed view of history.

Some will derive pleasure merely from vetting the authenticity of the clothes and materiel, the accuracy of the action, the appropriateness of the locations. There are many old trains to admire, puffing prettily along mountain riverbeds.