Review: Netflix's starry Black Western 'The Harder They Fall' is both a dazzler and a muddle

"While the events of this story are fictional … These. People. Existed." So begins "The Harder They Fall," with an intriguing setup and enough jarring punctuation to drive home that you're watching (ahem) a period picture. And as if it were taking its cue from all those full stops, this historical Western fantasia unfolds at its own disorienting stop-and-go rhythm. When the outlaw Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) settles a score in the opening moments, he shoots his man four times and occasions four blood-spattered freeze-frames, each one bearing a word from the movie's fatalistic title.

For dramatic purposes, Nat is the most significant of those fact-based, fictionalized gunslingers, a Black cowboy