One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest review: Aaron Pierre is electric in problematic story

McMurphy, though, is an anarchic lord of misrule, who establishes regular card and basketball games on the ward, gets the rules governing TV access changed, and sexually taunts Ratched. He coaxes the “half-Injun” Chief Bromden (Arthur Boan), who is apparently deaf and mute and has had 200 electric shock treatments, back to speech and macho “bigness”. And he decides to get the stuttering, virginal Billy Bibbit (Kedar Williams-Stirling) laid, luring a pair of prostitutes into the ward for a riotous second-act party. Even the fussy, professorial Dale Harding (Terera) – a closeted gay man, unbalanced because his wife is “well-endowed in the bosom department” – succumbs to McMurphy’s gravitational pull.