Apple TV+’s Shantaram Is an Intriguing but Disorganized Rumble Jumble

Gregory David Roberts is one of the most interesting men you’ve never heard of. He wasn’t familiar to me, anyway, but spend a moment on his Wikipedia page and your curiosity will be piqued. This is a man who was known in his younger days as “the gentleman bandit” for his polite demeanor when he robbed banks to support his heroin habit. When he finally got caught, he escaped from Australia’s Pentridge Prison and managed to flee to India, where he spent 10 years before he was captured trying to smuggle himself into Germany. Back in his home country, and back in prison, he began to write the novel Shantaram, which was apparently destroyed by guards twice before he was released six years later. Importantly, Shantaram is a novel, not an autobiography, despite the fact that the main character is a man very much like himself who escapes an Australian prison and flees to India. “It doesn’t matter how much of it is true or not to me,” Roberts has said, “it’s how true they are to all of us, and to our common humanity.”

If all of this sounds jumbled yet intriguing, congratulations, because you are in the right frame of mind to consume the Apple TV+ adaptation, also called Shantaram. Starring Charlie Hunnam as Lin, the fake name chosen by Roberts after his escape (and which, we’re told often, means “penis” in Hindi), it’s a little bit disorganized, a little bit confusing, and mostly fun. After 92 episodes as Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy and a good deal of film work, Hunnam is back, and—instead of an American—the English actor is playing an Australian who masquerades as a New Zealander and who, when the moment calls for it, can do a passable American accent. (Considering the fact that most of the action takes place in India, the writers have basically all of the major English colonies covered.) He’s a little kinder and gentler here than in Sons, and has more of a sense of humor, but the quiet desperation and inventiveness that defined the biker prince is very much present: that strange and occasionally thrilling combination of both loathing and craving the state of being in a jam. The pull-and-tug is everything; this is someone who is constantly getting mugged or setting fires just at the moment of departure. 1980s Bombay (they call it “Bombay” instead of “Mumbai,” so I will too) wants him gone, but he’s Corleone-like in the sense that at the very moment when freedom looms, the city manages to pull him back in.

As usual, Hunnam is a strong choice of a lead, and the supporting cast is similarly strong; Shubham Saraf, as the “no. 1 guide in Bombay” and Lin’s friend, is particularly good early in the series, as is Antonio Desplat as the shrewd businesswoman Karla who befriends Lin, uses him, and then finds herself in way over her head. In terms of the story, though, there’s a lot of chaos here. It starts out with a prison escape scene, which is compelling on its own, but then quickly takes us to Bombay, where Lin manages to ricochet between the slums, the criminal underworld, the police, the thriving nightlife, and everywhere in between. This is definitely one of those stories where some guy gets off a plane and immediately becomes the main character of the foreign place he’s never been before, where nobody knows him, and while that begs belief here and there, the viewer is mostly able to get lost in the frenetic pace and put those concerns behind.