Black Panther Meets New Hollywood in ‘The Big Cigar’: Review

Huey P. Newton would have been skeptical of The big cigar, a miniseries that dramatizes his 1974 escape from the U.S. to Cuba — and the show is the first to admit it. “The story I’m about to tell is true,” says the co-founder of the Black Panther Party (played by Moonlight It is The Knick star André Holland) in a narration that prefaces the electrifying six-part series, which premieres May 17 on Apple TV+. “But that It is passing through the Hollywood lens, so let’s see how much my story they’re really willing to show it.” The fact that Newton’s wariness of mass culture frames the story from the beginning is a sign that viewers are about to face something much smarter, bolder, and more challenging than the typical, sanitized approach of the media industry. entertainment about radical politics.

The story that informs writer Jim Hecht (Victory time) and showrunner Janine Sherman Barrois’ (Claws) the action-packed drama is surprising in its own right. As The big cigar executive producer Joshuah Bearman told in 2012 Playboy feature that the series adapts, Newton—who had previously served time on charges of killing a police officer, a conviction that was later overturned—became a fugitive when he was accused of murdering a 17-year-old sex worker. . (Newton insisted he was innocent of both crimes.) With limited options, amid a movement antagonized by law enforcement and torn by internal conflict, he turned to his friend Bert Schneider (AmsterdamAlessandro Nivola), the countercultural-minded producer behind Easy Knight. Bert’s solution? Plan Huey’s escape like it’s a blockbuster movie.

Dubbed, yes, The big cigar, the fake film project allows Bert—who is white, Jewish, and the son of a Columbia Pictures studio head—to mobilize resources (e.g., a corporate jet) that Huey, as leader of a financially precarious grassroots organization of radicals, black people, I could never have accessed it alone. Even with a wealthy ally, Huey’s escape is a logistical nightmare. The FBI, most vividly personified here by Sydney Clark (Marc Menchaca), an unhinged agent who hates having to wear his hair long for a secret post as a hippie, is relentless in interrogating Panthers, family members and anyone else connected to Huey. Bert, his childhood friend turned producing partner Steve Blauner (PJ Byrne), and their fellow creatives collaborate with Huey on a series of crazy schemes. Shot in the kinetic, often split-screen, New Hollywood style, the show’s action sequences are imaginative and thrilling. A shootout at Canter’s deli has all the style and wit of a Scorsese or Coppola joint.

As immaculate as they are, these settings are just the most impressive facet of a largely introspective story. Interspersed with Huey and Bert’s confusion are flashbacks to pivotal moments in Huey’s life: his founding of the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale (Jordane Christie) in 1966, the iconic photo of him in a wicker chair brandishing a spear and rifle, his release from prison in 1970, his schism with fellow Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver (Brenton Allen) over Cleaver’s preference for armed militancy over serving the black community.

These are not bullet points for a dry Wikipedia-style biography. They function as portals to Huey’s state of mind in 1974. Eldridge, now exiled in Algeria, is mentally calling the Panthers’ breakfast program soft. On the other end of the radical spectrum, Bobby has turned to electoral politics and blames Huey and his outlaw associates for ruining his chances of winning the 1973 Oakland mayor’s race. Huey is thinking about his beloved father (Glynn Turman), a preacher, who warns him against messianic illusions: “Most of the world’s problems arise when the messenger thinks he is the message.” Government surveillance and infiltration, through programs such as COINTELPRO, made him paranoid. Confusion reigns over whether dissent within the Panther ranks is organic or orchestrated by undercover agent provocateurs.

A portrait emerges of a brave and thoughtful man whose vision of, as he says, “a world beyond conflict and violence” is under attack from all sides. Huey is driven by revolutionary ideas; The big cigar addresses the work of left-wing thinkers such as Guy Débord It is Frantz Fanon. (Fortunately, it also trusts viewers to do their own research, rather than feeding us baby-food simplifications of 20th-century political philosophy.) But unlike the idolatry and vilification that plague so many depictions of radical leaders, he is also only human. Hecht and Barrois wisely—if sometimes too visibly—draw parallels between Huey and Bert; Both men are idealists with drug problems and a tendency to use the revolution as an excuse to neglect the people who love them. While the series does a disservice to the female characters on the periphery of this story, it manages to convey the many risks that Huey’s loyal girlfriend, Gwen Fontaine (Tiffany Boone), takes and sacrifices she makes in her name.

The big cigar works on several levels. It’s a retro action thriller. It is a fictional representation of American history and the biography of a counterculture giant. It’s a showcase for Nivola, Boone and especially Holland, who balances Huey’s intelligence, courage and post-traumatic paranoia. There is humor in the culture clash between revolutionaries and Hollywood types; a screenwriter piloting a rescue boat becomes so distracted, typing a script about what he’s doing exactly at that moment, that he crashes into an underwater sculpture of Jesus.

Although the events it fictionalizes could not be more quintessentially 1970s, the show has relevance to a current reality in which the government’s treatment of American dissidents is once again drawing ire, in connection with a conflict that has tested titles Between the Black and Jewish communities what Dating back to the civil rights era. The big cigar It does not deify its activist characters, but it also does not hide its sympathies. The final line of on-screen text, printed over images of the Black Lives Matter protests, makes it explicit: “The need for a revolution continues.”