REBEL WITH A CAUSE

“IT’S ALRIGHT

to stretch the word of the Lord sometimes,” admits God-fearing, fire-breathing abolitionist John Brown (Ethan Hawke). It’s an approach the exuberant, darkly comic miniseries takes toward matters both historical and reli

gious, as each epithe disclaimer, “All of this is true. Most of it happened.”

Hawke is the big star (and, with Mark Richard, adapted James McBride’s novel), but the wild story of Brown’s violent campaign to end slavery in “Bleeding Kansas” is told through the eyes of Henry “Onion” Shackleford (terrific newcomer Joshua Caleb Johnson), a young slave whom Brown mistakes for a girl. That Brown can’t recognize that Onion is a boy in a dress is the first sign of many that our hero isn’t quite all there. For that matter, he isn’t always much of a hero. But shifting the perspective allows Hawke to go mountainous with his performance. He is a sweaty, manic, delusional wonder, giving the story a jolt whenever he appears.

Using the national atrocity of slavery as the subject matter for a comedy presents an enormous degree of difficulty. The Good Lord Bird threads the needle by deriving most of its laughs from the self-importance of Brown himself, and from the other white characters. And an episode featuring Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass improbably but successfully turns this cartoonishly violent pulp story into a door-slamming bedroom farce for a bit. But the heinousness of owning people is always taken seriously — and so, by the end, in spite of all his abject ridiculousness, is Osawatomie John Brown himself.

A.S.