Ethan Hawke & Mark Richard's adaptation of James McBride's semi-historical novel is a fascinating and morally complex endeavour. We follow the story of John Brown through the eyes of the fictional Little Onion - a teenager emancipated through violence and trying for the most part to simply survive this turbulent era in American history. It's a slightly irreverent version of real events, with Brown's formidable wife sadly excised but its fanciful twirls are neatly balanced against the brutality and come across as keen wit rather than clumsy revisionism. The real lynchpin of the whole endeavour is Ethan Hawke's battered Brown who oscillates wildly between devout believer and violent zealot never quite settling into anything categorizable but is a bewitching screen presence (despite portraits of Brown clearly pointing at Willem Defoe as the obvious choice - a casting bugbear that may bother me forever).
The cast are uniformly impressive, from personal favourites like Beau Knapp, Wyatt Russell and Steve Zahn to revelatory turns by a rather pompous Daveed Diggs and the arrestingly bemused Joshua Caleb Johnson who shines throughout. Also KILLER MIKE IS IN IT. GUYS, KILLER MIKE. GUYS. SERIOUSLY. What's more it feels a timely story - John Brown is the first American tried for treason and through him is the existential prism of what America was and is. A wrestle of our times, of all times, is it THE grand experiment of self-identification, freedom and democracy or the turbulent land of overt evangelism and violent segregation? Either way or neither way the US is inarguably at the pinnacle of televisual storytelling and the Good Lord Bird is a fantastic addition to that weighty canon of great American TV stories and a nice atmospheric taster for the complex and bloody historical legacy of abolitionism.
