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This week’s picks include self-destructive sibling thriller Black RabbitCharlie Sheen’s wild documentary and can’t-look-away performance by Sheridan Smith in the Brit drama I Fought the Law.

Black Rabbit ★★★ (Netflix)

Kudos to the make-up and lighting teams on this bleak Netflix drama about a self-destructive sibling bond. Across the eight episodes, stars Jude Law and Jason Bateman have a just-present sheen of sweat at crucial moments, which gives off a glint of desperation. It’s the final touch to two first-rate performances that draw more emotional resonance out of this limited series than the storytelling allows. The duo compensate for a work that has the right pieces, but never quite assembles them correctly.

Right from a cold open that gets very hot, creating a pre-ordained turning point you know is inevitable as the plot jumps back a month, Black Rabbit will lean into the wrong elements as it sets up the Cain and Abel pairing of the Friedken brothers: Jake (Law) and Vince (Bateman). The former is the family man proprietor of the titular New York restaurant/VIP bar who has generated just enough buzz that he can potentially cash in, while the latter is a corner-cutter whose busted schemes bring trouble.

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Created by writers Zach Baylin (King Richard) and newcomer Kate Susman, Black Rabbit can’t quite find a gripping take on this pair, even as Jake brings Vince back into his life after a dubious flameout out west. No sooner is Vince working at the Black Rabbit than the loan sharks he skipped out on years prior are at the door, interest calculations in hand and Jake made co-holder of the debt. A good chunk of the narrative is the two scrapping for cash and extra time.

It gets repetitive, but it doesn’t get to the core of their relationship. That’s a shame because some of the other storylines tied to the pair have illuminating possibilities. Vince has an adult daughter he barely knows, Gen (Odessa Young), who becomes collateral in his payment plan, while a situation around the restaurant’s best bartender, Anna (Abbey Lee), speaks to the all too prevalent toxic undertow in the hospitality game. The brothers run a lot, but perhaps more should have caught up with them.

The trade-off for all this is that the final two instalments, directed with sabre-sharp efficiency by Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), have a palpable intensity – even more of that sweat – while spilling details that actually add to the complexity of who Jake and Vince are to each other. It’s compensation, but is it enough? The sly suggestion that Jake hides a manipulative edge and that Vince has a decent streak comes too late. Can a series get a director’s cut?

aka Charlie Sheen ★★½ (Netflix)

To his credit, Charlie Sheen is open about his chaotic life throughout this biographical documentary. Clean for eight years, the 60-year-old grandfather doesn’t punch down and provides commentary on his many misdeeds. Along the way there are wild soundbites: childhood friend Sean Penn suggests science “ponder his biology”, due to Sheen’s ability to ingest and prosper under staggering amounts of illicit substances; while Sheen’s crack cocaine dealer says working for the sitcom star in the 2000s was like “winning the lottery”.

But Sheen isn’t really challenged by director Andrew Renzi in their interviews. Over almost three hours, the documentary favours chronological detail over genuine contemplation. We go from Sheen’s Malibu childhood through Platoonrehab, Spin Cityrehab, Two and a Half Menmeltdown, rehab. Acting is a pay cheque, not an art, and only rarely does the documentary pause to acknowledge the people – often women – who didn’t get another chance. Sheen nods to his privilege, but doesn’t value it.

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Sheen’s father, actor Martin, and older brother Emilio Estevez didn’t participate, but there’s telling analysis from his Two and Half Men co-star Jon Cryer and bleak commentary from several ex-wives. The subject of domestic violence is tiptoed around, with Renzi instead cutting in clips of Sheen’s roles as a flippant meta-commentary before some final revelations about his sex life. That this frustrating documentary comes with an upbeat ending is another unearned privilege.

Highest 2 Lowest ★★★ (Apple TV+)

Spike Lee’s first collaboration with Denzel Washington in almost two decades starts with a lustrous sheen and charisma under pressure, as Washington plays a New York music mogul, David King, whose business plans are derailed by a kidnapping.

The moral twists that follow, particularly between David and his best friend, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), have a simmer, but as soon as the plot moves onto the city’s streets the energy, in both the performances and Lee’s almost joyous camera moves, goes up a satisfying notch.

I Fought the Law ★★★½ (Stan*)

Anchored by a can’t-look-away performance from Sheridan Smith (The Moorside), this four-part true-crime drama tells the story of Ann Ming (Smith), who along with her husband, Charlie (Daniel York Loh), spent about 30 years campaigning to change Britain’s double jeopardy laws after the man who killed her daughter, Ann, went free because of police incompetence and a hung jury. The chronological structure is clean and almost predictable, but the show pays close attention to what slowly happens to the living as they struggle on behalf of the dead.

The Girlfriend ★★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

Smartly using twin perspectives, so each episode is divided between the beliefs and schemes of two adversarial protagonists, this London-set psychological thriller mostly balances the fine line between feminist critique and women behaving madly pulp.

Posh gallery owner Laura Sanderson (Robin Wright, also the lead director) and the younger, working-class Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke) square off over control of Daniel (Laurie Davidson), the former’s son and the latter’s boyfriend. This limited series gets to some crazy places after a warm-up of dinner-table sniping and sexual control, but the implausibility doesn’t lessen the enjoyment.

Dark Winds ★★★★ (Netflix)

This bracing crime drama, set in 1971 and following a Native American police officer, Joe Leaphorn (Zach McClarnon), keeping watch on Navajo Country, debuted in 2022 and has had has several smaller streaming homes. Its Netflix debut hopefully earns it a serious second -hance audience who can appreciate its interweaving of a nefarious thriller’s plot, telling observations on community and culture, and the hard weight of history. McClarnon was a wry supporting player on Disney+’s Reservation Dogsbut his lead performance here is quietly magnetic. Fans of Deadwood and Mare of Easttowntake note.

Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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For anyone who has read her acclaimed memoir, it’s mind-boggling that Neko Case didn’t always consider her story book-worthy.

“Not really, you know? Kids think what they’re going through is what everyone goes through. I didn’t think my story was weird until I was in my early 20s and I told somebody what happened with my mum and they were like, ‘That is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.’ Then I was like, hmm, it is pretty weird, isn’t it? Most people’s mums don’t really fake their deaths very much.”

In The Harder I Fight The More I Love Youpublished this year, Case – the Grammy-nominated singer best known for her soul-baring voice and imagistic-bordering-on-mystical lyricism on albums such as Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2006) and Middle Cyclone (2009), as well as her role in the power-pop supergroup The New Pornographers – outlines her formative years growing up an only child amid parental neglect in the US’s Pacific Northwest, in the era where the Green River Killer cast an ominous shadow.

Her story plays out like a movie, charting the path that led her to a creative life. Within the opening 30 pages, we find out that her mother – who Case’s father, when she was in second grade, had told her had fallen ill and suddenly died of cancer – had faked her death and fled to Hawaii, only to return into Case’s life two years later with a new boyfriend.

Bestselling memoirs have been built on far less drama, but Case never felt an inclination to write her story. When she was approached by Grand Central Publishing of Hachette to write a book, she’d initially planned on writing a fiction novel.

“I grew up in a family where you don’t really talk about yourself that much, so the idea of writing a book about myself was the last thing I thought I would do,” Case says. “But they were like, no, we’re gonna pay you to write a memoir. And I was like, okay then!”

Case has said she took on the memoir as another revenue stream after touring was interrupted during COVID. Since its release in January, the book has been quite successful, earning acclaim and reaching the New York Times’ bestseller list. Has it worked financially?

“Not really,” she says wryly. “Because the publishing industry, you get promised a good amount of money, but they give it to you in such chunks, so far apart, that I’m already in debt. It doesn’t help. It’s really difficult.”

Touring remains the most immediate way to make money as a musician and Case is preparing to return to the road with Neon Grey Midnight Greenher first album since 2018’s Hell-On. She’s called the album, purposely grand and orchestral, a love letter to musicians in an era that increasingly favours digital replication.

“The culture we’re in right now is very much about immediacy, and musicians are being treated very badly. They’re trying to replace us, which is stupid,” she says. “But machines can’t make music the way we do. AI is not gonna make a song that makes you pull your car over and cry. It’s just not gonna happen.”

Weirdly enough, that’s exactly how people have been reacting to viral AI bands such as Velvet Sundown and Let Babylon Burn. “I’m not interested,” says Case of AI’s inroads into music. “It’s all just another sad footnote. Another sad joke in what is our culture at the moment.”

In press notes, Neon Grey Midnight Green is described as Case’s first album that’s been entirely self-produced. It’s a bristly distinction. “Well, I’ve actually produced most of my records,” says Case. “There’s no such thing – unless you make a record from start to finish by yourself – where making an album isn’t collaborative, and I don’t have any problem giving credit where credit is due. But the bulk of the work is always mine. For this record, I just decided I was going to start crediting myself like a white man.”

At 55, Case’s take-no-shit defiance is inviting, not combative. When we speak over Zoom, she’s in her studio in Vermont where she’s lived for almost 20 years, seated under a large painting of wild horses at play.

In her memoir, she describes how nature and animals were a constant companion amid parental neglect, recalling days spent chasing “grasshoppers the size of staplers with underwings like striped blushing flamenco skirts”. Her Substack, titled Entering the Lungis filled with nature writings. On Neon Grey Midnight Greena song titled Tiny Gears spends its four-minute runtime enviously marvelling at a spider weaving its web.

“I write a lot in the morning, and I love watching the passing of time through little changes,” says Case. “Right now, for example, the milkweed is up, the flowers are done but you’re starting to see little holes in the leaves because the monarch butterflies, the caterpillars, are starting to eat. This is right when they get going, and their cocoons will be up by the end of September. Pretty soon, there’s going to be big spiders everywhere in the fall. I love seeing little things like that and watching them repeat themselves. I think all those little moments are worth amplifying because they’re so beautiful. There’s just so much more to the world that’s interesting to me to write about than heterosexual love.”

‘I’m a gender-fluid person and I’ve never felt like just a woman or just a man.’

Case touches on that topic specifically on album standout, Rusty Mountain. Over majestic strings, she craves a better sort of love song, something that speaks more openly to our time. “It’s not about he and she, or heteronormative love; it’s a call for love songs that anybody can put themselves in,” says Case.

On the opening two-part coda Destination and Tomboy Goldshe sings to and for “the gay women and the gender-expansive people” she admired most coming up in music. “They just cut a different swath than other people did. They had more confidence. They were doing their thing whether people were looking at them or not, and I just took so much inspiration from watching the way they carried themselves, especially because I’m a gender-fluid person and I’ve never felt like just a woman or just a man or any of that, I just feel like a person,” says Case.

“I always resented being cast as a ‘woman in music’,” she adds. “Especially when I was younger, it would break my heart when men wouldn’t want to be friends with me. I just wanted to talk about music, but everybody thought I wanted to be their girlfriend or something. I just was like, this isn’t my place, I’m in the wrong era, I don’t know where I belong.”

For the past decade, Case has been writing the words and music for a Broadway adaptation of Thelma & Louiseexpected to open on London’s West End late in 2026. “It’s as close to done as it can be,” she says. “I’ve never been interested in musicals, but I’ve always been interested in Thelma & Louise. I was the target audience for that movie when it came out. I stood up, like, yes, yes, yes!”

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She was handpicked for the gig by the film’s writer Callie Khouri, and spent last Christmas living in Times Square while the show went through rehearsals. “I’m so happy for her that she gets to expand on her story because there’s a whole backstory between these women that you can’t fit into a two-hour movie,” Case says.

The campy glitz of Broadway musicals isn’t a natural setting when considering Case’s work. Did she deep-dive into the world of “I want” songs and such? “I still know nothing about musicals but I’ve been working on this one for almost 10 years, so it’s been a quick lesson but a very long lesson. I know I love Sweeney Todd,” she says.

Oh, so it’s the subversive kind of Broadway musical? Case grimaces. “It’s not so much subverting it, as it is refusing to dumb it down. It’s too important for that.”

Neko Case’s Neon Grey Midnight Green is out on September 26.