Movie review: 'Mr. Untouchable'

Photos:

3 stars (out of four)

As interesting, certainly, as “American Gangster” (which opens next week), and operating with a truer street sense of the characters involved, director Marc Levin’s documentary deals with heroin kingpin Nicky Barnes and his various associates. Nonjudgmental without being morally dense, the film makes human sense out of an inhuman example of addiction capitalism, ’70s style. And as we know the ’70s never go out of style.

When Barnes made the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1977, wearing his red, white and blue necktie, Harlem’s worst-kept gangster secret—the king of the heroin trade, living the “Superfly” life—attracted the attention of, among others, President Jimmy Carter, who requested that this public menace be brought to justice. Eventually he was caught, but in terms of dollars and cents Barnes had a good run, albeit a run littered with the corpses of his business rivals and his smacked-out, track-marked customers. Then Barnes flipped and gave the feds name after name, leading to conviction after conviction, and today lives in relative seclusion (he’s filmed here only in shadow), while many former colleagues remain behind bars.

The documentary techniques employed by Levin are standard-issue, but “Mr. Untouchable” affords a full and wide perspective on Harlem’s drug trade. It’s fascinating to hear ex-gangsters, once and current DEA officials and various cops and robbers pay homage to Barnes on camera, without guile or calculation. Everybody knows he was a rat who talked, and in this regard his story relates to the story of rival heroin dealer Frank Lucas, the considerably softened center of “American Gangster.” In that film, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Barnes, in all his pimped-out glory. More on that one next week; meantime, telling another thug’s story in another way, “Mr. Untouchable” is a fine warm-up.

Add a comment