‘Dead Man Out’ a Sharp Indictment

“Dead Man Out” is a stirring lobby against a system that seeks to make people well in order to kill them. The fine, evocative, deeply moving HBO prison drama airs at 8 p.m. Sunday.

You may fault its message but not its effectiveness in making you care about its characters or the way it draws you inside their thoughts. This is powerful work.

Ironies and paradoxes define the protagonists of Ron Hutchinson’s grim and troubling story. Court psychiatrist Alex Marsh (Danny Glover) is assigned to work with an especially difficult, incommunicative Death-Row prisoner named Ben (Ruben Blades), who seems to have gone insane, giving him a reprieve from execution. Marsh’s job is to certify Ben mentally “competent” so that the state can take his life, just as Ben took the lives of four innocent people in a senseless robbery.

Hutchinson and director Richard Pearce subtly expose the inner minds of their characters without completely unmasking them, compromising them or submerging them in false sentiment.

The slow-evolving relationship of Marsh and Ben, during which a certain amount of bonding and role reversal occurs, is painful and fascinating to watch. In making Ben re-examine the roots and consequences of his bleak, destructive life, Marsh must face his own demons and the meaning of his assignment.

Glover is excellent as the self-doubting Marsh, and Blades gives a seething, raging, slashing performance to remember as Ben, whose coarse eloquence speaks for itself. “Don’t you think it’s loony,” he asks, “to tell a guy, ‘Thou shalt not kill, and to rubber it in, we ice you?’ ”

Pearce artfully conveys the gray, claustrophobic doom of Death Row while expanding on psychological and intellectual levels a movie that probes deeply moral and ethical issues.

What “Dead Man Out” doesn’t do is lay enough legal foundation for Marsh’s assignment by clearly noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that executing an insane person constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. What “Dead Man Out” does do is provide memorable viewing.