Stream It Or Skip It: ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’ on Showtime, a Violent Fable About a Legendary Australian Antihero

Now on Showtime, True History of the Kelly Gang opens with a subtitle reading, “Nothing you’re about to see is true,” which almost disqualifies it as a BOATS (Based On A True Story, yo) movie. See, it’s a fictionalized iteration of the life of Ned Kelly, an Australian outlaw and/or folk hero (they call ’em “bushrangers” in the Outback) who lived fast and died young in the 19th century — the Aussie version of Billy the Kid, maybe. It’s based on an award-winning novel by Peter Carey, who styled it as Kelly’s autobiography; it’s directed by Justin Kurzel, who made a pretty rad Fassbender/Cotillard Macbeth and followed it up with a pretty wretched Fassbender/Cotillard Assassin’s Creed; it stars George MacKay of 1917 fame, and Essie Davis of The Babadook. I hereby confirm that all this adds up to something… interesting.

TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Australia, 1867. In a shack on a patch of land that’s all dead trees and scrub and dust and looks about two years removed from a wildfire, lives the Kelly family. Young Ned (Orlando Schwerdt) is 12. In about a dozen years, Ned will be infamously dead, and that ain’t a spoiler, it’s history. He watches his mother, Ellen (Davis), um, orally service Sgt. O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam). Ned hates the living tar out of the guy, and when you meet him up there on the screen, you will too, because he’s a loathsome cretin. Ned’s father Red (Ben Corbett), an Irishman who settled halfway across the world, seems a troubled sort. Ned is shocked to learn that his father likes to wear women’s clothing; Ned’s reaction is to commit a manly act like providing for the family by slaughtering a steer for dinner and turning up at the doorstep covered in blood and dragging a leg of beef. Ellen’s never been prouder.

Ned’s probably less shocked when Red is snatched and imprisoned and is soon subsequently dead, probably by the hand of O’Neil, or at least as a result of his neglect. But that doesn’t mean the kid isn’t traumatized, and angry. One of Ellen’s suitors is Harry Power (Russell Crowe), who seems like a decent role model for Ned until he takes the kid on a trip and proves to be a murderous thief who paid Ellen £15 to take him. Ned learns some outlaw lessons from the guy, gets his first taste of crime and moral depravity, and enjoys an opportunity to put a bullet in O’Neil, although he ends up not enjoying the situation much at all, considering it’s intense and O’Neil is naked as a jaybird and Ned is still a boy. A boy.

Jump ahead about a decade and Ned (MacKay) is a bare-knuckle boxer who pastes his opponent right in the puss and sprays blood all over an upper-crusty woman in the front row. He looks like the sinewiest wedge of twisted beef jerky in the bag, all muscle and bone and seething rage. He’s been gone for a while and returns home to dear Mother and finds she’s engaged to a barely-a-man who’s about Ned’s age, and has inspired Ned’s brothers to become horse thieves. There’s a cop, Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult), who’s replaced O’Neil as the local horny, corrupt shitbird, and a young prostitute, Mary Hearn (Thomasin McKenzie), with whom Dan falls in love. Of course, everything will go haywire, especially when Ellen is tossed in jail and Ned’s marbles roll and scatter and he kills men and gathers his brothers and friends to don women’s dresses and rebel against authority (and maybe even kiss each other), all of which is the kind of stuff that leads to an all-too-brief existence in this here mortal coil.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: True History is like a nineteenth-century Australian Fight Club.

Performance Worth Watching: Essie Davis plays the wild and damaged catalyst of all this with the righteous command presence her crazy-matriarch character demands.

Memorable Dialogue: My favorite bit of cheery, upbeat Ned Kelly voiceover narration: “Sgt. O’Neil’s words lay inside me like the egg of a liver fluke, filling my imagination with vile thoughts that bred like maggots.” Make sure he gets a birthday party invite!

Sex and Skin: Nothing too graphic or fully frontal, but we see prostitutes at work and Nicholas Hoult threatening sexual violence upon a woman in a disturbing scene.

Our Take: Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially when it comes to Ned Kelly’s cross-dressing gang and the queerness that manifests among these hardy, angry, violent men. “Toxic” is not a strong enough word for this display of masculinity, spurred as it is by loyalty to a mother who wails her exasperated lament to the sky: “Are there no men of SUBSTANCE in this godforsaken country?” Kurzel turns the story of Ned Kelly into an escalating hallucinatory experience, crackling and bursting with visual potency and concluding with the surreal showdown of legend, when Kelly strapped on bulletproof metal armor and engaged in a brutal shootout that would eventually result in him being hanged by the neck until he was dead.

Kurzel’s approach is more cerebral simmer than the rowdy, violent, orgiastic hoedown we may expect for an all-guns-blazing bandit-pariah. His big finale consists of more nightmare imagery than blazes of glory, an artful approach to the traditional fables of Western lore. One can understand why — there’s little point in masticating the same old cliches, so why not try to elevate the genre to something more artful? The director is not eager to please, almost stubbornly so; his transitions and narrative leaps are creative but obfuscatory, forcing us to scramble a little to regain our bearings, and despite the ultraviolence on display, he shows at-best fleeting interest in inciting the type of visceral response we might feel when an antihero cuts loose. It’s more a what-horrors-of-the-mind-that-men-do story of seeping madness than straight-out amoral sociopathy, and all this is just a long-winded way of saying it doesn’t pack quite enough of a gut-level wallop to feel wholly satisfying. But it’s an admirably ambitious and provocative movie nonetheless.

Our Call: STREAM IT. True History of the Kelly Gang isn’t always functional, but it’s worth a look for Kurzel’s bold vision and unconventional approach to the biopic.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream True History of the Kelly Gang