Elgin James writes about people on the outside who want in, and he writes them with more feeling than most. The trouble is the plot: when the guns come out, as they usually do, the characters he has built stop talking and start running.
Fi1m perspective
A hi-vis vest, a half-painted wall, seven strangers on community payback who would never have chosen each other. That is where The Outlaws (2021) begins, and it is the Elgin James situation in miniature: people who do not belong anywhere, put in a room together and left to find out whether they can make a family of it. In Mayans M.C. (2018), which he created with Kurt Sutter, the family is already a gang. In The Outlaws, which he wrote with Stephen Merchant, the family becomes a gang by accident. James has said the characters began as archetypes he wanted to "crack them open and see their insides and go deeper", and that part of his writing we trust.
He came to it late and from outside. He sang in Boston punk and metalcore bands in the 1990s, went through the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and wrote and directed Little Birds (2011), a coming-of-age film drawn from his own life that critics liked for its performances and found broad and familiar in its shape. He co-wrote Lowriders (2016). Then came Mayans M.C., where the early run was widely knocked as a retread of biker-drama habits, heavy on blood and light on surprise, and the later series, with James running the show, were credited with turning towards something harder: violence that costs the people who commit it.
The Outlaws is the one we know best, and it shows both halves of him at once. The payback scenes are good: Merchant's jokes, a sure sense of who in the group is lying to themselves, and a cast that includes Christopher Walken doing something worth the evening on its own. We laughed a great deal at the paint table, and we felt the fun drain away every time Malaki arrived to menace Christian and the money had to be hidden again, because the threats were real enough to stop the jokes and not built enough to replace them. Fifty-eight minutes is a long time for a sitcom and a short time for a crime drama, and across three series the show was often both and neither.
The pattern holds. Give James a group of people with nowhere else to go and he will find what they want from each other, and he will not flinch from what it costs them. Ask him for a plot and he reaches for the genre nearest to hand, bikers or heists, and the reviews, ours included, keep landing on the same complaint: the machinery is the weakest part. He is next writing on Prison Break and preparing to direct In the Shadow of the Mountain. We would like, once, to see him put the guns in a drawer and let the people talk for the whole hour.
Biography
Elgin James is an American writer, director and producer. He co-created and co-wrote the BBC/Amazon series The Outlaws (2021) with Stephen Merchant, and co-created the FX series Mayans M.C. (2018), on which he also served as writer, director and executive producer.
Earlier in his career James directed and wrote the feature film Little Birds (2011) and co-wrote the film Lowriders (2016). He previously performed as vocalist in the Boston metalcore band 454 Big Block and fronted the hardcore band Wrecking Crew.
