The Crowded Room, Apple TV+, review: Tom Holland should stick to superheroes
Tom Holland is best known for playing Marvel’s Spider-Man, to which he brings whipper-snapper enthusiasm and an ever-so-slightly wonky American accent. The accent continues to wobble as the London actor makes his first foray into being a television leading man in The Crowded Room (Apple TV +). But this serpentine drama – where even the moving parts contain moving parts – is otherwise universes removed from the CGI-drenched frippery of the superhero genre.
That isn’t to say it doesn’t have a splinter of popcorn in its DNA. Holland stars as Danny Sullivan, a nervy kid in grungy late Seventies New York who, as the action begins, is arrested for his part in a gun attack near Rockefeller Plaza. So far, so Taxi Driver. But as the 10 episodes play out the period grime is gradually wiped away. As this happens, The Crowded Room’s pulpy heart confirms it to be a cousin once removed of Fight Club and the feverish thrillers of M Night Shyamalan.
Revealing more would count as a spoiler. Suffice to say the twist that eventually chugs into the station is one viewers will have seen coming. As will anyone with knowledge of Daniel Keyes’s 1981 novel The Minds of Billy Milligan from which The Crowded Room is adapted, and which is itself based on a real-life trial.
It’s a shame the Scorsese touches are a misdirection. As homage to the thumping dinginess of Seventies Manhattan, The Crowded Room works brilliantly. But when show-runner Akiva Goldsman (who won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind) switches to a more earnest mode, much of that fun drains away.
Danny’s story is mostly relayed as a sequence of interviews with police psychologist Rya Goodwin; she is played with scenery-shaking sincerity by Amanda Seyfried, who works hard at bringing nuance to a character written as a sort of two-dimensional mental-health Florence Nightingale. Troubled Danny contains multitudes, she discovers. He outlines his exploits as a drug dealer and his troubled relationship with a brutal stepfather (Will Chase).
The Crowded Room morphs into an entirely different series a few episodes in when Danny details a brief exile in London. There he meets louche criminal Jack Lamb, portrayed with a villainous twinkle by Jason Isaacs. The actor has great fun as the thuggish dandy. Ostensibly a friend of Danny’s father, in reality his relationship with the young man runs more deeply than meets the eye.
Holland (who also serves as an executive producer) and Seyfried throw themselves into the melodrama. Yet they are up against it as the tale crawls to a thuddingly obvious conclusion. Given the truth about Danny, it’s hard to see how it could have ended any differently. But after its initial foray into Times Square noir, in the end, The Crowded Room makes for disappointingly empty viewing.
