I have had problems with Baz Luhrmann in the past. Australia is a fevered mess. The Great Gatsby spent millions of dollars missing the point of its source material. (In fairness, so has every other adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, except perhaps the ones made for radio.)
But his new series The Get Down, which dropped on Netflix today, is the sort of thing that makes up for all of his other silliness. A drama about the rise of hip-hop music and culture in 70s New York, it’s precisely the type of storytelling he does best: full-on immersion. Like his magnificent, rapturous Moulin Rouge!, this six-part series smothers you in its created world, turning every scene into an experience.
Production design, sound design, camerawork and performance are all precisely attenuated to create an overwhelming cinematic juggernaut. You don’t watch it passively, you hang on for dear life.
There’s one other key difference: in The Get Down, Luhrmann’s scrappy heroes aren’t singing songs from the future: they’re creating them, right there in front of us. The thrill of musical innovation runs through the series like an electrical current, which also juices the love story at its core. And newcomers Justice Smith and Herizen Guardiola are revelatory not only can they handle Luhrmann’s intensity, but they wear his stylized 1977 aesthetic as though they’ve lived it themselves.
Here’s the other thing about The Get Down: it is not a series designed for casual viewing. Like Stranger Things, it’s an intensely composed show you can lose yourself in the small, perfectly placed details. That makes it more absorbing, but also more demanding than most of the content out there on the web. I don’t care what kind of resolution your phone offers The Get Down was not made for it. It wants to splash across the biggest screen it can find, and you should let it.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
