How can you be a leader to your people if you’re on the run from them? It’s a fascinating question, one that could serve as the basis for a great book or film, but one that’s hard to embed in a six-part mini-series, a format that proves the wrong one for the story of how a fake movie played a role in the life of Black Panthers leader Huey P. Newton. With intentional echoes of “Argo,” which was also based on an article by Joshuah Bearman, whose 2012 Playboy piece inspired this project, “The Big Cigar” is well-intentioned but ultimately misguided. Incapable of giving a bad performance, André Holland almost saves it on his own, but even he succumbs to a characterization of Newton that doesn’t seem to fully grasp his power or even his justified paranoia. Oppressive narration tries to explain the importance of everything that happens in a series that consistently falters at the “show, don’t tell” test of filmmaking, largely because it’s unable to find the tone of righteous indignation at a broken society that fueled Newton and should have been the backbone of this fitfully entertaining but ultimately disappointing series.
Developed by Jim Hecht, “The Big Cigar” details the manhunt for Newton in 1974, a time when the government was so actively hunting members of the Black Panther Party that several of its leaders fled the country, and those who remained worried for their safety. The bulk of the six-part series details Newton’s efforts to escape the United States, planning to flee to Cuba via Mexico, where he could find safety with people kinder to the concept of revolution.
While most of this mostly true story is seen through Newton’s eyes, he has an essential dramatic partner in Bert Schneider, played with expected nuance from the underrated Alessandro Nivola. The producer of “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces” was working on his Vietnam documentary “Hearts and Minds” when he decided saving Newton was more important, pouring his efforts into a fake movie that would be shot in Cuba, the way to get Huey and his partner Gwen Fontaine (Tiffany Boone) out of the country with less suspicion. P.J. Byrne plays co-producer/ally Stephen Blauner, while “Ozark” star Marc Menchaca is memorable as an FBI agent intent on bringing Newton down, even if his character feels like more an amalgamation than a real person. The extended ensemble includes more familiar faces like Noah Emmerich as Bert’s brother, John Dornan as Bert’s dad, Jaime Ray Newman as Blauner’s wife, and Glynn Turman as Huey’s father, Walter—all good to great, even if most of them feel ultimately under-used.
The list of performers in the previous paragraph do their absolute best to hold “The Big Cigar” together as it constantly pushes and pulls against their best efforts. Hecht and his writers inexplicably play chronological gamesmanship with a story that would be stronger told directly instead of forcing viewers to keep up with when the current event is taking place in Newton’s trajectory. It doesn’t help that so much of the dialogue repeats itself and has that troublesome issue in period dramas wherein everyone sounds like they know they’re in a 2024 Prestige TV show. The scripts for “The Big Cigar” lack the subtlety that this story demands, constantly putting words in the mouths of their characters that sound forced and manufactured. That the cast does as well as they do to add nuance to the superficial telling of this story is a testament to their talents.
The harsh truth is that too much of “The Big Cigar” lacks its subject’s revolutionary spirit or righteous anger. It’s partially due to the chapter of his life that Hecht and company choose to tell—one shaped by being on the run and constantly concerned about surveillance—but it also just seems like the team wasn’t willing to take true artistic chances outside of the narrative jumble, which backfires. This is a series that should burst with the energy of its great theme song—“Underdog” by Sly & the Family Stone—but almost seems scared to really dig into some of its most interesting ideas. How is it possible to lead a revolution when everything you say and do is being watched? And when a system comes crashing down on you, is it better to run away and regroup or stay and fight?
“The Big Cigar” may lead some viewers back to the story of Huey Newton, a life far more complicated than the one captured here. (While it’s not as kind to Newton, Stanley Nelson Jr.’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” would be a good place to start.) And stories of how ’70s Hollywood intersected with the causes of the day in ways that seem impossible now are inherently interesting to film and TV lovers. There’s a lot to like on the surface of “The Big Cigar.” It’s just too bad there’s no real fire to go with all this smoke. [C]