Is Donald Glover the hardest working man in show business? It’s getting hard to argue otherwise.
Maybe the name doesn’t ring a bell for you (although probably it does), and maybe that’s because Glover, 33, doesn’t seem to devote himself to one particular media but to all of them. He’s in movies. He has created a TV show. He just released his third major-label album as Childish Gambino, a nom du hip-hop taken on a whim from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator.
Before that, Glover was in the ensemble of TV’s “Community’’ for six seasons. Tina Fey hired him to help script “30 Rock.’’ He enlivened a few episodes of “Girls’’ as Hannah’s long-suffering “black boyfriend.’’ Soon he’ll be playing the young Lando Calrissian in the Han Solo “Star Wars’’ spinoff scheduled for 2018. Glover could probably write a novel if he gave himself the time. Hell, he could probably write a multimedia opera. In fact, he might have already done that with his last album, which came with a four-act screenplay.
Glover isn’t just in movies, he steals them. He was the math geek who walked away with his scene in “The Martian,’’ explaining how to get Matt Damon back home by flying a pen into Jeff Daniels. He was Andre, the scrawny singing male stripper who briefly detoured “Magic Mike XXL’’ into Teddy Pendergrass territory. As a working critic who has to see mostly every movie that comes around, I first noticed Glover as the sharpest thing in the cute but underwhelming teen farce “Mystery Team’’ (2009), written with his colleagues in the Derrick Comedy troupe. You can tell when someone has it, even in embryo. Glover did and does.
Similarly, he hasn’t just created a TV show, he’s responsible for one of the glories of small-screen 2016. All 10 half-hour episodes of “Atlanta’’ are out there for streaming, and you would do yourself a mighty favor by watching them. The show is both a pinpoint comic portrayal of a young African-American underclass, Southern variety, and a surrealist human comedy of striving and setbacks, inertia and luck, love and (un)happiness. There are invisible cars and black Justin Biebers. The character who appears to be the ensemble’s chief thug turns out to be its moral center. In a supporting role, the great Lakeith Stanfield appears to have beamed in from Alpha Centauri.
Above all, “Atlanta’’ is smart. The show can make you laugh uproariously one minute, then shock you with empathy the next, and it’s Glover’s baby all the way. He came up with the idea, wrote or co-wrote all the scripts, stars as Earnest “Earn’’ Marks, and directed the show’s two cleverest episodes, “Value’’ (in which Earn’s girlfriend Vanessa, played by Zazie Beetz, is forced to consider her worth as a black woman during dinner with an old friend) and “B.A.N.’’ (which expends the entire 30 minutes on a brutal parody of the Black Entertainment Network, fake ads and all).
As for his involvement with music, Glover doesn’t merely make records, he excavates decades of playlists inside his head and ours, searching for his identity as a musician and a man. Just as Earn in “Atlanta’’ stands self-consciously on the fringes of the title city’s hip-hop culture — the character’s an Ivy League graduate who can’t find his footing back home and ends up managing his rapper cousin (Brian Tyree Henry) — so Glover’s musical persona Childish Gambino was never all that convincing as a rapper on previous albums like “Camp’’ (2011) and “Because the Internet’’ (2013).
Still, those albums are soaked in the sounds and ethos of hip-hop culture. They’re proud sonic symphonies from a self-professed music nerd who frets anxiously over issues of authenticity and belonging. And the new Childish Gambino album, “Awaken My Love!,’’ released Dec. 2, is a throwback tour de force to the funk ’n’ soul sounds of the 1970s.
To be precise, the thing plays like it’s August 1974 on your midnight radio. There are elements of Philly Soul, Parliament-Funkadelic and Bootsy Collins, Rick James, and Rare Earth; echoes of Stevie Wonder and Kiss, smatterings of Todd Rundgren and even Frank Zappa (the George Duke era); look-aheads to Prince on the horizon. I’m just scratching the surface here.
If that ultimately sounds derivative, it is. It’s also a lot of fun. A hallmark of Glover’s work, it’s becoming clear, is energy and overreach. No two songs on “Awaken My Love!’’ sound alike. No two episodes of “Atlanta’’ play out alike; certainly the sketch-comedy satire of “B.A.N.’’ bears little resemblance to the soulful insights of “Value.’’ This may turn out to be an artistic weakness. For now, it’s a creative strength.
Likewise, in his movie roles, Glover tends to play it curiously self-absorbed while remaining the most interesting person in the room — we’re drawn to him because his characters are always thinking about something and we want to know what. It’ll be fascinating to see how he channels early Billy Dee Williams opposite Alden Ehrenreich’s Han Solo, and that as-yet-untitled “Star Wars’’ project will certainly bring Glover to the attention of mainstream audiences and a global pop culture. But why do I think he’s just getting started?
Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com.
