Brown visits the establishment in 1858, during the Bleeding Kansas conflict-a years-long series of violent skirmishes over whether the future state would permit slavery-and starts preaching abolition.
McBride (an executive producer of the miniseries) filters him through the perspective of a fictional protagonist: Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson), an enslaved boy who assists his barber father in a Kansas tavern. Like a solar eclipse, Brown burns too brightly to be viewed straight on.
If he’s a bit of a holy fool, too quick to trust anyone who claims to share his convictions, then he can also be surprisingly insightful he perceives the complacency of progressive Northerners and realizes that many, many people will have to die to liberate Black Americans from bondage. Merciless with enslavers, scarily fervent on the abolitionist lecture circuit and prone to temperamental outbursts on the frequent occasions when his plans go awry, Hawke’s kinetic Brown is breathtakingly patient, kind and generous with his family and followers. He’s clearly fascinated by zealots-characters locked in existential struggles with faith and morality and their duties to a world that falls egregiously short of their ideals. So let us now praise Ethan Hawke, who co-created the adaptation with Mark Richard ( Fear the Walking Dead) on the heels of his career-highlight performance as a priest driven mad by contemporary tragedies both personal and global in Paul Schrader’s core-shaking film First Reformed. Few actors could step into the shoes of this real-life walking contradiction: a Christian minister who embraced Old Testament justice, a loving father who sacrificed several sons to his cause, a violent extremist on the right side of history.
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