'Black Bird' review: Prison drama is must-see viewing

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The famed novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River") brings to Apple TV+ a six-part limited series starring Taron Egerton as James Keene, a convicted drug dealer who agrees to work as an informant for the FBI in exchange for a commutation of his 10-year sentence.

There's no scenario wherein that would be easy work, but Keene finds himself tasked with a particularly wrenching assignment: leave his lower-security prison for a supermax facility, become friends with convicted murderer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) and get the suspected serial killer to tell him where he's buried the bodies of other women he's believed to have killed.

"Black Bird" also stars Greg Kinnear as Brian Miller, the Illinois detective who put Hall away, Sepideh Moafi as FBI agent Lauren McCauley, the protagonist's primary contact in the bureau, and the late, great Ray Liotta as Keene's father.

It's an adaptation of the real Keene's autobiographical novel "In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption."

MY SAY Lehane orchestrates a drama of great texture and consequence, even as it unfolds entirely within grim, confined settings.

Whether it's the brutal Missouri facility housing Keene and Hall, the police stations and conference rooms where Miller and McCauley pour over the facts of the case, or the flashbacks to past horrors, one thing remains consistent in a viewing of the first four episodes: there's no sunlight here.

But the series has more to offer than wallowing in predictable true crime sleaziness or cheap suspense. Lehane instead constructs a story that turns around feelings of profound guilt and disappointment.

Keene wakes up each day only to be smacked with the sickening reality that his actions have turned him from a skilled athlete with a bright future into a convict.

They're feelings driven home in some of the series' best scenes — prison visits with his father where Liotta and Egerton richly portray what happens when a father and son must reckon that they've failed each other.

The underpinnings crystallize further in the most central relationship in "Black Bird," as Keene gets to know Hall and comes to the disquieting realization that even people who may have done the most horrific things imaginable have moments where they might be likable and sympathetic.

Egerton and Hauser build on these complexities through performances that amass a strong sense of their inner selves jamming up against exterior guardrails.

In Egerton's case, as Keene, it's a confident physicality that's undercut by a tangible sense of fear at his predicament. Hauser plays Hall with a softness and thread of innocence that's both disturbing, when his darker impulses come out, and genuine at the same time.

Because it has the patience to allow for the characters to construct themselves and their relationships without hurrying them from one plot point to the next, "Black Bird" effectively conveys the complicated reality of undercover work and what it has to say about the human condition.

BOTTOM LINE This is a must-see and not just for fans of the prison genre.