Hightown just another highlight for Bruckheimer

Jerry Bruckheimer is back with Hightown, a murder investigation with the sort of characters that keep audiences coming back for more.

A scene from Hightown

Hightown comes from the production company of omnipresent crowd-pleaser Jerry Bruckheimer, king of the popcorn flick, the most successful movie and TV producer in history and, like everything that comes out of this mercurial 76-year-old mastermind’s creative spread, the show is focused on visual expression. His favourite memo to his writers over the decades? “This is not radio.” His frequent answer to questions about his process: “We’re storytellers.”

Hightown has Bruckheimer’s fingerprints all over it, a tense “ripped from the headlines” — to borrow a phrase used by producer Dick Wolf to characterise his successful Law and Order franchise — crime thriller that looks at the abuse of and addiction to opioids in the US, including prescription drugs, heroin and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. The pacy, sometimes jittery narrative follows one young woman’s somewhat reluctant attempt at sobriety when she finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation involving local drug-running gangsters.

It was created by Rebecca Cutter for Jerry Bruckheimer TV; Cutter is a writer and producer on the DC Comics prequel Gotham, and the series’ first two episodes are directed by the Oscar-nominated Rachel Morrison, who was also the cinematographer on Marvel movie Black Panther. It’s not Morrison’s debut in charge of an expensive shoot — she previously directed episodes of American Crime and Quantico. And Morrison didn’t shoot Hightown, relinquishing the position to the up-and-coming Radium Cheung, known for the indie sensation Tangerine, which he shot on an iPhone, as well as for his work on high-end TV series like The Americans, Billions and Golden Globe-winning crime drama The Sinner.

Cutter says that with this crime caper she wanted to create a story that reflected the kind of novels she devoured growing up, like the dark crime stories of Dennis Lehane, author of hard-boiled classics like Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island, certain that it was time to see a “tough guy” story with “ball-breaking language” told from a female perspective.

She sets this story in Provincetown, Massachusetts — the series was originally called P-town, the moniker used by locals, but changed as another drama was already in production with the same title. The expression “Hightown” becomes apparent in the first scene with a young woman in the front seat of car on a dark night sucking on a fentanyl lollipop, her girlfriend in the other seat, out of rehab, declining to join her.

This is a town that loves its drugs as much as it loves its famous carnivals with their parades of wonderfully costumed satyrs, centaurs, butterflies and trolls, and the legendary drag show scene along Commercial Street dating back to the 1950s. Drugs and drag both feature in Morrison’s long, punchy pre-titles context-setting montage, which juxtaposes scenes of rolling beaches, idyllic family picnics, those colourful processions along Commercial Street, the Sagamore Bridge, the famous drag queens, a map that shows the town’s place in the Atlantic and a sign that proudly proclaims P-town as “The First Landing Place of the Pilgrims”, with shots of armed police making raids, industrial pill production and various drug arrests.

Bruckheimer’s Hightown

Once a place where artists came to paint its light, comparisons made to the lagoons of Venice, but when the summer ended, and the painters left, the dark underbelly emerged, Norman Mailer writing of how “the long dingy undergarment of the grey New England winter, grey as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit”. But in the summer the town has long been a gay getaway, and a natural habitat for the vibrant young woman at the centre of Cutter’s story.

She’s Jackie Quinones, played with attractive energy by Monica Raymund, (the popular lead of Chicago Fire), a tough-talking, swaggering lesbian National Marine Fisheries Services officer, who likes to tell people she’s in law enforcement, wearing a gun and flashing a badge like a real cop. (She’s derisively known as a “fish cop”.)

But, while a popular figure around the town, she’s battling her addiction somewhat carelessly, is behind in her rent and partying whenever she can, her charms so irresistible after the shots of Jack she consumes with seeming immunity, she seems to pick up pretty young women from out of town with abandon. “I have an amazing life; I live in Provincetown, for crying out loud,” she says at one point. “It’s like f..king lesbian Shangri-La. I like to party a little bit, but it’s P-town. In P-town, you’re either a fisherman or a gay on vacation. Either way, they party, all right?”

After some unrestrained drug-fuelled sex with a cute blonde during Carnival, she wanders out of the seafront motel where they’ve been partying and finds the corpse of a young woman on the beach washed up in a super-moon tide. She turns out to be Sherry Henry, the fentanyl-sucking woman from the earlier scene.

She’s quickly identified by a necklace made of the initials LYLAS, which means “love you like a sister” and she’s been working as an informant for impetuous and somewhat arrogant state cop Ray Abruzzo. Played with a roguish mix of charm and recklessness by James Badge Dale, he and his partner take over the case, desperately attempting to tie Henry’s murder (“Juries don’t like it when white girls get capped”) to the activities of imprisoned kingpin Frankie Cuevas, an impressively imperious Amaury Nolasco, who still runs his empire from jail.

As the investigation quickly involves Cuevas’s stripper wife, Renee, a subtle, nuanced performance from Riley Voelkel, after Abruzzo blackmails the mother of one in the attempt to twist information out of her, Jackie finds herself in felony trouble that could end her cherished job and forces her into rehab. It’s all a bit generic in the procedural sense as far as the plotting goes; some of the supporting characters thinly written and not much more than devices to move the narrative. (They stand out though — Bruckheimer as producer has always excelled at the notion of casting as characterisation.)

But it’s entertainingly put together by Morrison and Cheung, whose camera rarely stops moving, constantly taking us inside the action in a visceral way as we follow Jackie on her assignations, her boozing and pill popping, and Abruzzo on his driven stalking in search of answers. We are obviously in little doubt that the two storylines will collide as the second episode unfolds and that Jackie will look for some kind of redemption as they do.

What lifts the show from the usual procedural conventions is the central performance. Raymund is terrific as Jackie, wearing a tilted smile despite her awareness of her problems, the world and its inhabitants a source of endless amusement. From much experience performing before it, she knows the camera loves her face and would find it even if she were in the middle of a million Carnival parades.

But she finds courage too in her characterisation of Jackie that suggests this tough little woman cannot only cope with her rehabilitation but solve the mystery she becomes part of when she discovers the body of Henry in the sand. She’s the kind of character Bruckheimer says he loves, a sucker for stories featuring bold heroes who take wild rides to victory.

The other element that boosts Hightown is the assembly-line influence of Bruckheimer. Everything that comes from his stable is about visual provocation and stimulation — few words but a dazzling array of extreme close-ups, moving camera angles, rapid-fire editing and lots of loud pop music and dazzling colours. It’s always full-on — the opening of a refrigerator exuding the same graphic energy and cinematic refinement as an action scene. It’s a style about placing one arresting optical against another in quick procession.

From the start he brought to TV that sense of “glossy enormity” — a nice expression of critic Joseph Beven’s to describe this kind of experience — perfected by directors Ridley and Tony Scott in the 80s and Michael Bay in the 90s. You could see it in shows like popular cop series Cold Case, which ran for 156 episodes until 2010. Along with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI Miami and Without a Trace, and not forgetting The Amazing Race, the Emmy-winning show with which Bruckheimer has been involved wince 2001, the most hard-wearing of reality formats, America’s version of Around the World in 80 Days. Critics like to joke that if Jerry does any more TV shows Hollywood will have to name a network after him.

As the novelist Philip Kerr said of Bruckheimer’s flicks, “anyone who tells you he doesn’t like the bright, brash, rock’n’roller-coaster style of a Bruckheimer movie is probably the kind of person who doesn’t like funfairs and fireworks, and who wants to ban people from smoking while riding horses and hunting foxes”.

And it’s just as true of his TV shows.

Hightown streaming from Sunday on Stan.