Harlem’s notorious Nicky Barnes, an adolescent junkie turned
multimillionaire drug lord — and a figure played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.
in the forthcoming American Gangster — gets a nonfiction workout in
director Marc Levin’s engrossing documentary, which takes its audience
deep inside the heroin industry of the 1970s. One of the most powerful
black drug kingpins in New York City history, Barnes reached such
heights of arrogance that he actually posed for a cover story in the
New York Times Magazine (below) touting his status as a Teflon Don. Soon after,
it all came crumbling down. Slapped with a life sentence, Barnes would
eventually seek payback, cooperating with law enforcement by turning
his organization inside out.
Avarice and revenge are the two main throughlines here, and they pulse
with a quicksilver energy unmatched in many genre features that tread
similar narrative ground. Candid interviews with criminal syndicate
deputies like Joseph “Jazz” Hayden and Leon “Scrap” Batts (as well as common-law wife Thelma Grant, who comes off as a Imelda
Marcos-type figure
scene, painting a convincing portrait of prison as little more than
“crime school.” Various attorneys, police detectives, and newspapermen
of the era, meanwhile, help tie up loose chronological ends in fine
fashion. Still, Mr. Untouchable has the chief benefit of being told in
the voice of its subject. Though interviewed in shadow, and now
70-plus, Barnes still has an arresting presence; he quotes Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and Machiavelli at length as the inspirations for his
business. Some of his air-quote insights are rather silly (“There was
something about pure cocaine and young women that held an inevitable attraction
for me…”), and if Barnes is additionally delusional and espouses seemingly incongruous value
sets, the film still shows you, in fascinating fashion, how he comes to
these contradictions honestly, out of self-preservation.