True History of the Kelly Gang review – stylish but frustrating punk western

The truth, somewhat paradoxically, can be highly subjective – entirely different, but no less “true,” depending on whose version we’re watching play out. It’s this notion, perhaps, that has given director Justin Kurzel, who impressed with his Macbeth but disappointed with Assassin’s Creed, the permission to take such creative license with this adaptation of Peter Carey’s award-winning book. In his hands, True History of the Kelly Gang eschews the realism of Carey’s novel in favour of a punky, highly stylised retelling of the Ned Kelly myth. It resembles the book in plot, but not at all in tone. It’s a film with much to admire, but one that is sure to frustrate.

Orlando Schwerdt plays Ned Kelly as a young boy in the film’s impressive first act, who lives in a colony in Victoria, Australia, with his prostitute mother, Ellen (played by Kurzel’s real life wife Essie Davis) and a deadbeat father who is always in trouble with the authorities. The aesthetic that Kurzel has designed takes some getting used to, as the idea of any “truth” playing out is reinvented as something with the air of a grimy music video. As characters waltz about in strange chic outfits, there is an intended fakeness about both them and the CGI-enhanced sets; never a doubt that what we’re seeing is some sort of fantasy in the mind of the titular anti-hero.

Kelly’s life as an outlaw begins when he’s enlisted by Harry Power, a famed bushwhacker played by a weighty Russell Crowe, who takes the boy under his wing and teaches him the ways of the scorched, unforgiving land. Eventually Kelly comes of age and Schwerdt is switched out with actor George MacKay, who impressed with his hollow-faced performance in 1917, and plays Kelly here as an increasingly manic and unhinged character whose problematic circumstances nudge him towards his infamous and seemingly inevitable fate: that of the crazed, trigger-happy outlaw, captured and hung by the authorities at the young age of 25.

There are admittedly moments when it works, where the performances transcend the chaos of the design. Yet the biggest problem with Kurzel’s approach is that this retelling often feels hectic and messy in a way that undermines the story that’s being told. The tale jumps from plot point to plot point with an incoherence that is ultimately jarring, as Kelly is forced to confront numerous sadistic policeman, over and over, played not unsuccessfully by Charlie Hunnam and later Nicholas Hoult.

There is little room left for this film to breath, though; and as Kurzel increases the stylistics to a point where any sense of believability is thrown out the window, it’s at times hard to understand what is happening, let alone stay invested in the characters’ convoluted machinations. By the end this “True History,” despite running at over two hours, feels oddly incomplete. Repeatedly hitting on false notes, Kurzel just about makes the heady trip worthwhile. But only just.