I Know This Much Is True review: Gloomy show is brilliantly acted but impossible to recommend

I Know This Much Is True (Sky Atlantic) is a six-part miniseries, adapted from Wally Lamb’s 900-page novel of the same name, that appears to have been made mainly for the benefit of its star, Mark Ruffalo. Directed by Blue Valentine’s Derek Cianfrance, it is television as endurance exercise, an unrelentingly grim procession of trauma and misery that starts with a mentally ill man cutting off his own hand in a library and becomes steadily less jolly from there. In the first episode alone, to go with the mutilation, there is abusive parenting, cancer, divorce, death and incarceration in a mental facility. It will not be mistaken by many viewers for Last of the Summer Wine.

Ruffalo plays Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, twin brothers born either side of midnight at the start of 1950. Dominick is a housepainter, not in an Irishman way, with an ex-wife, anger-management issues and a troubled past. Thomas is schizophrenic and Christian, and struggles to make sense of the world around him. In the opening scene Thomas walks into the library, mutters some scripture and sets to his wrist with a knife. In hospital, the doctor asks Dominick to sign off on surgeons’ attempts to reattach it, while Thomas pleads with him not to, explaining that it was a sacrifice to help prevent the Gulf War.

The drama then alternates between past and present, with Dominick’s struggle to find a path out of this crisis for his brother interspersed with flashbacks showing how the Birdseys got to this point. Their version of northeast America is a lonely place, a land of bad TV and medication and an oppressive justice system. The brothers grew up not knowing who their biological father was, instead raised by their mother (Melissa Leo) and stepfather (John Procaccino). A violent piece of work, the latter speaks mainly in sports metaphors and believes that stricter parenting could have saved Thomas from his mental illness. Ma is diagnosed with cancer and, as a present to her Dominick, gets his Italian grandfather’s memoir translated by an academic (Juliette Lewis, providing the only fleeting levity).

These Big Male Actors love a crack at twins, don’t they? Tom Hardy as the Krays in Legend, Nicolas Cage in Adaptation, Adam Sandler in Jack & Jill. Nothing is better for showing one’s Range, and maybe Ruffalo felt that this gave him the scope for a more sensitive exploration of duality than was afforded by his turns as The Incredible Hulk. I’m almost afraid to say it because it’s so obvious, but Ruffalo is very good. Dominick is sensitive, angry, embattled, damaged but fundamentally decent. Thomas is heavier, a nervy pious soul, always hunching back into his shoulders like a tortoise. Ruffalo never overcooks it, sticking closely to the Tropic Thunder Awards Playbook. Someone ought to give him a prize on the condition that all his future performances must include a minimum of one (1) laugh?

I Know This Much Is True was never going to be easy to watch. But in a different climate it might have felt more cathartic, with a greater sense of redemption to Dominick’s struggle. Against a background of international gloom it’s not what the doctor ordered. There is enough despair in the atmosphere. I Know This Much Is True is sensitively written, stylishly directed, brilliantly acted, and impossible to recommend.