Around the world in 80 lays

HBO’s latest, ‘The Deuce,’ gets down and dirty

The old joke about 42nd Street and Times Square in New York is that it was called 42nd because that’s about as long as you should ever hang out there.

In 1971, Times Square wasn’t the Disneyfied, neatly scrubbed monument to consumer excess that it is today. Then, lined with porno theaters, sex shops, platoons of prostitutes, and all manner of vice and inequity, 42nd Street was a poster child of New York’s sleazy charms. Full of pimps, hustlers, junkies, and thieves, its degenerate populism drew rich and poor alike. It’s where Sinatra got the notion that if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.

And, like Baltimore, it’s an ideal place and time for veteran television-writer and crime reporter, David Simon (“The Wire”) to spin a web of complex, layered stories like a cultural anthropologist of lawlessness.

As with his previous work, Simon (with frequent collaborator George Pelecanos) starts “The Deuce” (HBO) at the periphery with a cast of disparate characters whose circumstances, stations, and proximity draw them into closer and closer orbits, sometimes to explosive effect.

Vince (James Franco) is a bar owner who is on the hook for debts owed by his gambling addict, twin-brother, Frank (also played by Franco). Desperate to pay off the money, but also to make something of himself as a bar owner, Vince goes into business with a Gambino soldier, Rudy Pipilo (Michael Rispoli).

C.C. (Gary Carr) is a seemingly affable pimp who picks up Lori (Emili Meade), his new, main girl, fresh off the bus from Minnesota, and promises her the moon—which he’ll deliver on, though C.C. is far more ruthless than he seems.

Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a free-agent prostitute and single mom who, tired of pimps trying to bring her into a stable, finds herself at ground zero of the burgeoning hard-core porn industry.

They are the tip of an ensemble cast whose qualities bring to life an era in ways that no amount of period production design could.

“The Deuce” is everything you would expect from its pedigree. Simon and Pelecanos write with a documentarian’s eye for the real life details of the time and characters, all of whom you believe could have existed. It’s essentially “The Wire,” trading out the drugs for sex, with omniscient, explicit observations of the cops, the criminals, and the casualties—a Dantean purgatory where a Travis Bickle might wish for a rain to come and wash all the trash away.