‘Boom Boom Bruno,’ a macho man in a world of glitter and sequins

Apparently Bruno is an alpha male. He has the highest rank in the community. He is the top dog. In reality, he is a police officer from a small and indeterminate town or from a peripheral district of an unknown city in Germany. Dazzled by American popular culture, he has pretensions of being his town’s (rather corpulent) sheriff with his cowboy hat and boots. His deputy is a shy young man who can’t quite take the leap out of the closet. The two will have to solve the case of the murdered drag queen Sugar Candy. The slaying fully immerses them into a peculiar underworld led by Lady Lovelyn, owner of the equally peculiar local cabaret that they naturally see from different perspectives and with different attitudes.

The odd couple struggles to survive between their harsh reality and unsatisfied desires. And as day to day life breaks down their personal barriers, each of the partners instinctively tries to preserve his own privacy. The six-part HBO Max miniseries Boom Boom Bruno is a show which, in the guise of a traditional police procedural, also makes its audience think about human behavior, its highs and lows. And in that sense, it is worth highlighting the behavior of drag queens, those individuals who are able to overcome the vileness of everyday life with the mere act of dressing up and putting on makeup with the awareness that exaggeration is one of the fine arts. Once in drag, they can leave their problems behind, at least for a moment.

Ben Becker does an excellent job of playing Bruno, who will gradually come to realize that he is not as much of a leader as he thought. Likewise, his hopes for his deputy to achieve the version of manhood that he attributes to himself will be dashed. Meanwhile, his shy assistant Mark, the perfectly cast Vincent zur Linden, will grow in confidence, and even in courage, and will stop hiding his homosexuality. Devised by Kerstin Laudascher and directed by Maurice Hübner, Boom Boom Bruno is unlike most series that investigate murders in which the killers usually have a traumatic past. The protagonists experience their personal traumas in the present. But all their dissatisfactions are diluted during the investigation until reaching a finale that will leave its audience feeling warm and fuzzy.

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