David Bianculli

In this universe, I'm pretty much tired of superhero films and TV series and random multiverses, and don't approach any new one with much enthusiasm.

When I heard about Spider Noir and that Nicolas Cage was starring, I couldn't imagine why he'd choose a superhero story for his first TV starring role.

Then I watched the eight-episode first season and realized it probably represents one of the best and boldest Nicolas Cage performances of his entire risk-taking career.

From the very start, Spider Noir takes the noir part seriously.

It's set in the Depression-era New York of the 1930s, and Cage plays a super-powered masked character known as the Spider.

When we meet him, he's loved and lost a woman, a story he recounts in the rain over her grave.

He's gone on a multi-year bender and now has an office as a private eye.

His name is Ben Riley.

If that opening narration sounds as though Cage is channeling a bit of bogey, well, he is.

But the imaginative conceit of Spider-Noir is that the bite that gave the spider superpowers also made him more spidery than human.

Ben Reilly, in order to blend in and do his job, really does have to act like a human and like a private eye.

So he goes to the movies and watches the latest Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney films and imitates them a bit.

But there also are scenes where Ben Reilly the gumshoe, like James Garner's Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files, hands out fake business cards and adopts different accents and dialects.

Cage has enormous fun with all of this, but also establishes that his character sometimes is primarily a spider and physicalizes that in a way that's just a riot.

If you saw him in Vampire's Kiss, you're familiar with his brand of unbridled acting.

And he's not acting alone.

Lamorne Morris, who won a well-deserved Emmy as the deputy on season five of FX's Fargo, plays a reporter who works with the spider and keeps his secret.

It's a rich role, and Morris delivers.

And so do the show's other co-stars.

The always commanding Brendan Gleeson plays the ruthless power broker Silvermane, who tracks down super-powered mutants to persuade them to join his gang.