In new Apple TV+ limited series Shantaram, Charlie Hunnam headlines as a man on the run from Australian authorities who starts over in Bombay — only to fall into still more trouble.
The ambitious drama, based on the best-selling book by Gregory David Roberts (which in turn was partly based on the author’s own experiences), charts a man’s new life in a hotbed of sin and all-but-sanctioned crime. Along the way, he discovers himself at long last in the least likely of settings.
Shantaram recap: New Apple TV+ drama stars Charlie Hunnam
Season 1, episodes 1 to 3: Dale Roberts (played by Charlie Hunnam of Sons of Anarchy fame) is gonna get murdered in a hurry if he doesn’t break out of HM Prison Pentridge, a notorious Australian prison. All the inmates think Dale is a snitch, and they’re planning to kill him. So he and his cellmate attempt a daring escape. Then, with a little help from an old friend, Dale flees to Bombay with a new passport and a new name: Lindsey Ford.
Lin falls in right away with sex worker Lisa Carter (Elektra Kilbey) and her best friend, Karla Saaranen (Antonia Desplat). He amorously flits between them and their roster of ne’er-do-well friends for as long as he can. But eventually, the cops hustle him one night and give him the impression that he’d be better off in a slightly less high-key city for a while.
First he must help Lisa and Karla with something, though. Lisa’s been given a kind of a contract with some local royalty and now can’t break free from it. So Karla asks Lin to impersonate her handler to get her out of the clutches of her nefarious clients.
Tangling with the underworld
Assuming the role of American Embassy official Gilbert Parker, Lin manages to impress Lisa’s captor, Madame Zhou (Gabrielle Scharnitzky) enough that they part with her. However, Lin correctly surmises that Karla wasn’t acting out of pure altruism. She, too, is connected to the underworld — and she needed information from Lisa. Freeing her from the Madame was just a silver lining. For his troubles, he gets rolled by a gang in the street.
Lin’s friend and guide Prabhu (Shubham Saraf) saves him just in the nick of time, then takes him back to his place to recover. Karla goes to her handler and friend, Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig), to explain why Lisa was being held by Zhou. (Khan and Zhou are opponents in the local rackets). And that, of course, means telling Khan about Lin.
Sensing his fortunes may change for the worse, Karla gives Lin a bunch of money and tells him to get lost. But fate has other plans. On his way out of Prabhu’s home in the slums, Lin crosses paths with an assassin. In the ensuing tussle, they almost burn down the whole shantytown.
Lin tries to atone for this by helping the burn victims, which makes everyone think he’s a doctor. When he wakes up the next morning, there’s a line around the block to see him. So much for a clean getaway.
Shantaram serves up a perfect role Charlie Hunnam
Photo: Apple TV+
Released in 2003, the novel Shantaram became an instant hit among a certain set of Beat poetry-reading would-be rebels. Johnny Depp wanted to adapt it back in 2008-ish, but that never happened. Depp tried to pass off the project to Joel Edgerton. Then everyone dropped out and it drifted off until it landed at Apple TV+.
Charlie Hunnam is kind of a mix of Depp and Edgerton (except he’s terrible at accents). And he’s got the kind of stoned, secretly smart-kid-who-acts-out-in-class vibes that a project like this tends to attract.
In real life, Hunnam is a funny kind of study. He wants people to know how smart he is, but he winds up confessing he reads Jordan Peterson and other pseudo-intellectuals, and winds up playing dopey heroes battered by fate more than men with strong senses of themselves.
Shantaram’s Dale/Lin is probably the best possible character for Hunnam to play, because he’s not just a brooding loner. Nor is he an Arthurian/Joseph Campbell kind of hero. No, the thing that’s most exciting about the part Hunnam plays here is how much he smiles.
On playing a hero
A lot of people talk themselves into hero parts by misreading lots of action as character. But here, Hunnam reacts and acts with equal ease, and the result is that Shantaram is actually a pretty good hang. The underworld stuff doesn’t get terribly interesting in the first three episodes, but watching Hunnam pass from misfortune to misfortune has a believability to it
It’s also the best possible in to a story like this. If Lin is meant to be a perpetual outsider (from his own life in Australia, from the people he meets in Bombay, from the criminal ecosystem he’s trying to skirt), then it helps that we also don’t really know everything about what he’s looking at, even though Lin does have a few too many utopian tendencies to be fully acceptable as a character. He’s a medically trained, empathetic, armed robber, ex-con, multilingual party animal.
All this would be a bigger problem if Shantaram wasn’t fun to watch. But I’m mostly enjoying it as it flies by for now. (The episodic nature of the book means that making this into TV was always going to be slightly awkward — and, lo, the showrunners scrambled the structure pretty heavily to get more out of several characters up top.)
Bharat Nalluri (MI-5, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) directs with a great sense of momentum. Details never linger longer than they need to to color Lin’s ongoing misadventures. Hunnam and the rest of the cast all fill out their parts ably (it’s always nice to see Alexander Siddig), and the pace is nice and breezy. So far, so good.
★★★☆☆
Watch Shantaram on Apple TV+
The first three episodes of Shantaram premiered Friday. New episodes arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
