Ironheart, Disney+ review — Marvel series follows a wannabe Tony Stark in Chicago’s South Side

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Before she became a TV screenwriter, Chinaka Hodge was a rapper-poet who was outspoken on the subject of gentrification. “Starbucks where the skate rink stood . . . kill a hipster save your hood,” she sang on a 2013 track, tongue firmly in cheek. It might seem a little strange, then, that Hodge is helming the latest offering from Marvel — a studio that has arguably had the same homogenising effect on the big screen as Starbucks has had on the high street.

But Ironheart — the new six-part series on Disney+ — is a superhero origin story in which the ambitious young protagonist comes up against financial struggles and societal disparities in her bid to be the next Tony Stark (aka Iron Man). Inspired by her late idol, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) has developed a prototype for an all-new armoured suit. Unlike Stark, however, she is not a middle-aged trust-fund technocrat with infinite resources and contacts, but a cash-strapped (if richly talented) Black teenager from Chicago’s South Side.

Riri will already be familiar to Marvel Cinematic Universe completists, having appeared in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But in contrast to other interconnected franchise outings, Ironheart tells a self-contained story that begins with Riri being expelled from MIT after trying to bankroll her extracurricular projects by selling essays to classmates. Back in the Windy City and desperate to keep her potentially revolutionary invention alive, Riri again finds a less-than-legitimate revenue stream — this time helping a ragtag gang of thieves steal from CEOs who are disrupting local neighbourhoods and businesses.

While the heist narrative introduces some welcome shades of grey to the back-story of a wannabe hero — and at least one moment where she veers closer to anti-hero — the show never really commits to fleshing out the robberies beyond a few cursory details and functional action scenes. By the second half, it all but gives way to some supernatural hokum involving the group’s leader “The Hood” (Anthony Ramos) — a shadowy shamanic figure harbouring dark secrets under his magical cloak.

Ironheart fares better with the human element of the story. Though perhaps human isn’t the right word, given that the series’ most rewarding scenes revolve around Riri’s slightly uncanny friendship with Natalie: a sentient, holographic AI version of her dead childhood friend (played by Lyric Ross). Despite the trauma that weighs on our protagonist (as it must in this kind of tale), this lively virtual recreation manages to break down Riri’s emotional armour and balance out her self-seriousness.

That the series lets the ethical and metaphysical quandaries raised by Natalie’s existence get lost in an increasingly unwieldy plot is disappointing. So too is writing that saddles its likeable cast (which includes Alden Ehrenreich as a neurotic black-market tech dealer) with cumbersome exposition. But for all the show’s flaws, the backlash and review-bombing that it has already been subjected to by a subset of online fans is at best disproportionate, at worst brazenly prejudiced.

★★★☆☆

On Disney+ now