‘Duster’ Review: Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson Lead J.J. Abrams’ High-Octane..

‘Duster’ Review: Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson Lead J.J. Abrams’ High-Octane, Low-Impact 1970s Crime Romp for Max


Many questions were raised when Warner Bros. initially announced “HBO Max” (and then “Max”) as the name of its big streaming platform.

The first and most obvious question was, “Why take a brand name as established and curated as HBO and dilute it with proximity to this much corporate flotsam and jetsam?”

Somewhere among the top five questions, though, was “Wait, can you use ‘Max’ when HBO already has ‘Cinemax’ as a corporate sibling?”

HBO’s disreputable younger brother, Cinemax attempted to shed or expand on its “Skinemax” reputation with a fairly successful run of originals between 2011 and 2019, a small group that included Strike Back, Banshee, The Knick, Warrior, Quarry and Jett. Cinemax originals were gussied-up B-movies in the best way possible — pulpy genre exercises with one or two-word titles perfect for splashing across posters or battered, well-read paperbacks.

Cinemax specialized in grindhouse TV and when HBO Max launched, Cinemax programming had no place in that ecosystem. Those originals are now on Max and Warrior even aired a third season there, but Max programming definitely has not aligned with Cinemax programming.

Leaving that Warrior season aside, J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan‘s Duster is probably Max’s Cinemaxiest drama to date.
A sunbaked, Arizona-set, New Mexico-filmed slice of ersatz grooviness, Duster has too much corporate polish to achieve the level of cultivated trashiness that made Banshee such a cult favorite — Duster is to the early ’70s output of Steven Spielberg as Banshee was to the early ’70s output of Monte Hellman, if that helps — but it’s fun and flashy.

These eight episodes don’t have much substance or meaning but Duster is like an R-rated Hot Wheels series and an entertaining star vehicle, so to speak, for Josh Holloway, Rachel Hilson and especially Keith David.

Duster begins in June of 1972. The Watergate break-in is in the news and the FBI is still trying to find its footing after the recent death of J. Edgar Hoover.

Hilson plays Nina, a fresh Quantico graduate. Director Hoover, she’s told, had encouraged the hiring of minority agents, in part because they could infiltrate civil rights groups, but in his absence, nobody quite knows what to do with her. She gets sent to the Phoenix office, which coincidentally happens to be where she wanted to go in the first place, because Nina is determined to bring down Ezra (David), a trucking magnate and regional crime boss.

Holloway’s Jim drives for Ezra. Tearing across the cracked asphalt and tightly packed dirt roads in a cherry red 1970 Plymouth Duster, Jim makes deliveries and pickups for Ezra, none more important than the season-opening acquisition — a new heart for Ezra’s ailing son Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson, underutilized).

Jim is a loyal soldier to Ezra and a loving “uncle” to little Luna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), who is not actually his niece, but that’s how Luna’s mother Izzy (Camille Guaty) wants to keep things. Jim also had a brother, whose mysterious death two years earlier still haunts him and offers Nina the wedge she needs to use Jim to bring Ezra down.

Things become more complicated as Ezra enlists Jim’s help on a big deal involving a somewhat wild MacGuffin, while Nina deals with racism and sexism in the local FBI offices, bonding with Navajo co-worker Awan (Asivak Koostachin) and plucky secretary Jessica (Sofia Vassilieva), forming a resourceful and overlooked trio.

I know he’s been busy with other things, but it’s shocking that Duster is Abrams’ first series as a creator/co-creator since NBC’s short-lived Undercovers back in 2010. You will have no problem recognizing Duster as an Abrams-produced show for superficial reasons like the giant floating text identifying different Southwestern locations, the reliance on in medias res episode-openers and the presence of Greg Grunberg as Abbott, the head of Nina’s FBI offices. But this is not a mystery box show. Well, sure, there’s a suitcase with confounding and unguessable contents, but the series sticks to terrestrial criminal excitement.

Abrams and Morgan wanted to build a property around Lost star Holloway and this is, indeed, a fine outlet for his confident swagger, apparently irresistible dimples and roguish charm. There’s some coasting on those established aspects of Holloway’s charisma and Jim’s behavior never gets so dark as to make him a bonafide antihero, nor does it force Holloway to stretch as an actor.

The biggest stretch is trying to figure out how old Duster is pretending its 55-year-old star is. Nobody comes out and says an age, but based on certain chronological markers like Jim’s decorated stint in Vietnam, I’m not sure he could be older than 40, but other details suggest that he should be even younger than that. (It’s a bad idea to compare how thinly Duster acknowledges Vietnam to Cinemax’s short-lived Quarry.)

Details related to the shared WWII service for Ezra and Jim’s dad (Corbin Bernsen) suggest the show doesn’t know how old anybody is supposed to be, so I guess you either accept it or you don’t. Sure, it means something completely different for Jim to be a low-motivation rapscallion drifting from one-night stand to one-night stand and lamenting his lack of professional advancement if he’s 35 versus if he’s 55, but… Holloway is very good, Bernsen has rarely been this refreshingly smarm-free and David infuses an emotional undercurrent beneath the gregarious scenery-chewing.

Hilson, not strictly a newcomer but eyeing a breakthrough here, has ample charm of her own, especially in Nina’s likable partnership with Koostachin’s Awan. Did that pairing, which even takes the characters onto the local Navajo reservation, remind me in geography, time period and Indigenous underpinnings of AMC’s far superior Dark Winds? Yes. Still, I like Hilson and Koostachin together, and Hilson does good bickering with Holloway as well. Kudos to the show for avoiding obligatory romantic tension on either front. For now.

The novelty of a Black, female FBI agent gives characters in Duster something to talk about, but this isn’t a Mindhunter-style exploration of the FBI in a moment of change any more than it’s a Norma Rae-style exploration of organized labor just because Izzy is working on a campaign to gain rights for female truckers. These elements make those two characters more interesting and feed the sense that, fancy driving aside, Jim isn’t much of a character, nor is he a product of 1972 in any meaningful way.

And it isn’t like 1972 is incidental to the story. In fact, the show is probably far more connected to its historical moment than you might expect. An early episode includes a road trip to Elvis’ house in Palm Springs, with a guest appearance from Colonel Tom, who won’t be the last real figure to be a character in Duster. The nods to actual history are both the wildest and most distinctive aspects of the show, and the ones that feel like a spice that wasn’t fully integrated into the stew.

Duster is more comfortable capturing the colorful surfaces of 1972 with its convoy of vroom-vroom vintage automobiles, Dayna Pink’s trendy-and-tacky costumes, and a soundtrack of hits so driven by shallow cuts from the period that nearly every episode includes at least one needle-drop that has already been indelibly associated with an earlier film or TV series.

Directors Steph Green and Darren Grant keep the show racing along, punctuating the visceral car-chasing action with bursts of violence that occasionally get cartoonish in their extremity, fitting for a series that makes direct nods to inspirations like Bullitt and Looney Tunes. There’s no pausing to think or feel about anything that’s happening, which becomes an issue when the show tries to make you care on an emotional level about either the relationships between the good guys or the inevitable demise of certain bad guys.

Derivative but unwilling to stand up to most of its logical comparisons, Duster is a high-octane, low-impact romp, designed to accelerate through the early summer months, leaving a whiff of burnt rubber and patchouli oil behind, but nothing more lasting.