You want to love a Baz Luhrmann creation. It’s so eager for your affection, genuine and open-hearted and, in an oddly winsome way, a little desperate. Luhrmann’s pictures are spangly, uncynical. They’re indulgent, but they’re earnest—Baz Luhrmann wants to make beautiful things that will move you. Oh, won’t you let Baz Luhrmann move you??
The problem is, the atmospheres Luhrmann builds are so thick that they make for tough entry: the first 20 minutes or so of everything he makes are discombobulating and unpleasant. Oftentimes, after all that initial bustle and silliness, Luhrmann gets somewhere interesting. Romeo + Juliet is probably his most coherent, richly realized work to date, but Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby, and, yes, even Australia (a movie I will go to my grave defending) have their moments. And that’s just in two-hour form. (Or, uh, three-hour, in Australia’s case.) Imagine what Luhrmann could do with a whole series—once those Luhrmann-y bad first impressions are past, he’d have hours to charm and amaze.
That’s the hope one has going into Luhrmann’s new series, The Get Down, which he co-created with acclaimed playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. One wants to like it because it’s Luhrmann, and because of its subject matter: The Get Down chronicles the rise of hip-hop in the burning Bronx of the mid-1970s. That’s fascinating, fertile territory to explore, even if it doesn’t exactly seem a match for Luhrmann’s penchant for tattered glam and opulence. Guirgis, who’s written caustic, crackling New York City plays like Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and the Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy, would seem to be the perfect realist counterbalance to Luhrmann’s flights of fancy. Together they could make something special about a watershed era for American culture.
And yet . . . they have not. As much as I wanted to enjoy The Get Down, there’s very little in the episodes I’ve seen (only three! So it could certainly get better!) that works. Luhrmann, who directs the 90-minute pilot episode, tries to tap into the kinetic vibe of the time and place—lively, dangerous, teeming with rot and possibility (though, of course, we may only see that possibility in hindsight)—but renders too much of it with a toothless whimsy. It’s fake grit, the Bronx as a less-popular area of Disney World. Not that a series about the Bronx, of any era, has to be grim and tough. But The Get Down struggles and fails to really locate itself, because nothing Luhrmann has created feels grounded in anything.
It’s also dull and poorly structured. Luhrmann and Guirgis introduce us to a panorama of lives, from young poet Ezekiel (an intense, sometimes to a fault, Justice Smith) and his pal/spirit guide Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore) to Jimmy Smits’s avuncular gangster to his aspiring-singer niece (and Ezekiel’s love interest) Mylene (Herizen F. Guardiola) and the sleazy/sad music-industry burnout ( Kevin Corrigan) trying to make her a star. It’s an appealing cast, and there are many strong performances. (I particularly like Smits, along with Skylan Brooks as Ezekiel’s sensitive friend Ra-Ra and Lillias White as a nightclub owner.) But The Get Down balances their story lines awkwardly, and misjudges our interest. Frankly, I’m far more intrigued by the political and criminal machinations of the grown-ups on the show than I am with Ezekiel’s tortured, nascent artist shtick.
Which is a major problem, considering the series is heavily focused on Ezekiel and company (along with some help from a fictionalized Grandmaster Flash) bearing witness, and participating in, the birth of American music’s most hallowed modern invention. Luhrmann and Guirgis have trouble selling it, or rather they pitch it the wrong way. They lay on the allusions to kung fu—martial-arts movies were something of foundational texts for a number of early hip-hop artists—in broad, cartoony strokes, giving these scenes an irksome, quirky tone that the show doesn’t have in other story lines. The scenes of actual music-making are hurried and have no sense of build. They just sort of . . . happen, until the show zooms erratically on to the next thing. The great Billy Porter does electrify as a disco D.J. in one tragically brief appearance, at least.
Where Luhrmann’s contributions end and Guirgis’s begin isn’t always clear, but in the finished product, their distinct, very different styles clash badly, instead of working in the odd, complementary harmony Netflix was likely hoping for. The Get Down takes some swerves into jarring violence that don’t square at all with the antic high comedy of other scenes. The performances range from Luhrmann-y hyperbole to tightly realized character study. None of the various story lines seem to exist in the same world, even as the show starts knitting them together. The Get Down is a great idea that is bungled in its execution, perhaps because at least one of the creators just isn’t suited to the material—temperamentally, stylistically, etc.
I’ll keep watching the show in the perhaps doomed hope that it will find some clarity and genuine, non-forced energy as it goes. But I have a hard time imagining that many people will want to watch more of The Get Down after its honestly rather grueling first episode. If people can get past that, things calm down and get better in the next two episodes—this is the Luhrmann way, after all. But I’m three hours into the series now, and am not sure how much longer I can wait for the real good stuff to kick in. This dynamic moment in cultural history is not served well by The Get Down, a blurry and jumbled hodgepodge that more than anything else feels like a missed opportunity. And so it is that, yeah, The Get Down really will get you down.