The Lowdown Ambles Toward Glory

Ethan Hawke’s face, an angular, beautiful cinematic presence since Dead Poets Society, gets put through the wringer on The Lowdown. In the closing minutes of the pilot, we see him behind the wheel, bloodied and gashed, left eye swollen shut, teeth smeared with red. The image grips you, but its gnarliness is undercut by absurdity: He’s laughing maniacally, having cheated death through no effort of his own. Creator Sterlin Harjo’s follow-up to his pantheon-great Reservation Dogs for FX, debuting this week, riffs on mid-century noirs and hard-boiled detective fiction, in which snooping protagonists are routinely roughed up, shaken down, and driven to the brink of madness. So it goes in The Lowdown, but Harjo filters the genre through his distinct sensibility, equal parts comic, hopeful, fatalistic, and regional. Hawke’s character is not the smooth, trench-coated detective of yore but a mangy dirtbag, repulsive and charismatic. Imagine plucking one of Richard Linklater’s Slacker oddballs and dropping them into a Raymond Chandler novel: familiar yet skewed, in a noir world refracted through Harjo’s sly humor and lived-in specificity.

Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a self-described “truthstorian” who runs a rare-books shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but moonlights as a citizen journalist — or is it the other way around? — filing longform investigations for a scrappy local magazine, The Heartland Press. The series kicks off when Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), a member of a powerful Oklahoma family, pens a suicide note, hides it inside a book on his shelves, and then shoots himself in the head. His death comes just after Lee’s exposé into the Washbergs’ long, sordid history in the state, but Lee doesn’t buy the cause-and-effect implied by the suicide. “Everything is connected,” he says. “Darkness is always afoot.” Could there be a cover-up? To him, the bigger picture is suspicious. Dale’s brother, Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), is running for governor, and he seems a little too intimate with Dale’s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn). At the same time, Lee is digging into Akron Construction, a company buying out Black-owned businesses in the region. He suspects a coordinated effort to strangle competition, which would hurt the local economy. Akron’s owner, Frank Martin (Tracy Letts), a power broker with deep pockets, is unamused by Lee’s prodding, as is the quiet, menacing Allen Murphy (Scott Shepard), who works for Martin.

So that’s the board as it’s set. But in true pulp-noir fashion, it’s not long before the pieces scatter to the point where the game becomes unrecognizable. Only five of the season’s eight episodes were provided to critics, and by the end of the batch, I still couldn’t quite tell what we’re supposed to be paying attention to. Not that it matters. The Lowdown isn’t powered by its central mystery so much as the shaggy-dog pleasures of watching Lee stumble through a Tulsa rendered with such vivid texture you can practically smell the Plains dust. It’s the kind of show that rewards kicking back and basking in its world. Lee’s shop sits in an unassuming row next to a tax lawyer with whom he lunches and stores his valuables; a record shop his daughter frequents; and a diner called Sweet Emily’s, where he does his thinking. His odyssey takes him to estate sales, livestock auctions, hidden islands, and a rowdy, violent, surreal kegger for law-enforcement officials. It also detours into his own history, when an old friend (Peter Dinklage) resurfaces midway through the season to check in, commiserate, and spar: “Do not quote David Foster Wallace to me, my brother.”

At its core, The Lowdown is a loving, spiky character study. Harjo — who serves as showrunner, wrote the pilot, and directed the first two episodes — harbors real affection for Lee, and you feel it in the density of quirks, contradictions, and traits packed into the role, all of which Hawke carries with ease. Lee is a pest and a scoundrel, chronically broke and overconfident, maybe a talented writer or at least one who’s quick with literary references. He’s conspiratorially minded, the sort who keeps one of those murder boards in his ratty apartment above the bookshop. He drives a sketchy white van so conspicuous that another character naturally dubs him a “pedo,” the back doors scrawled with the words You’re doing it wrong. Seen through a contemporary lens, Lee feels like a guy who’s one or two degrees away from a QAnon crank, except there’s a pure, humanistic engine in him. He’s earnest rather than angry, lost but charming in his pursuit of his purpose. “Don’t be scared for me,” he tells his worried daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). “Be scared for the people sleeping away their lives. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I’m living.” You believe he believes what he’s saying, but you doubt the argument as Lee belongs to TV’s ever-expanding fraternity of sad dads (see also Task) and lonely deadbeats. (Francis’s mother, whom Lee’s no longer with, is played by Kaniehtiio Horn, memorable as the Deer Lady on Reservation Dogs and Tanis in the underrated Letterkenny.)

On the surface, The Lowdown may seem like a curious project to succeed Reservation Dogs. After the latter’s sheer triumph of Native storytelling, Harjo’s choice to center his next project on a sad white guy, a prestige-television staple, may feel to some like an odd reversal. But Harjo circles a fascinating and mischievous idea with Lee. For all his idiocy, brilliance, and noble intent, it’s hard not to notice how easily Lee moves through spaces where anybody who isn’t a white dude likely wouldn’t survive. Over the course of the series, Lee impersonates a white supremacist to enter the home of another white supremacist’s mother and later poses as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer to break into a private space to jack some rare books. He’s often saved by his own gift of gab; at one point, he talks his way out of torture and possibly death at the hands of a criminal outfit he blunders into. The show doesn’t frame this as a critique so much as a matter of amusement. Lee is grating and unquestionably benefits from the privileges of his whiteness, but he also weaponizes those advantages for some notion of good — even if it’s self-serving, even if it ultimately leads to his own ruin. Hawke is splendid in the role, which makes deft use of his chatterbox charisma, the very same that can come off as annoying yet attractive in films like Reality Bites and the Before trilogy, or menacing in something like Black Phone. For all the things Lee gets called (“a narcissistic cowboy with a penchant for thinking they’re a good person”) and the things he calls himself (“I’m a good guy, that’s what we do, we call up bad guys and make them answer the phone”), perhaps the truest description comes from Cyrus Arnold (a scene-stealing Michael “Killer Mike” Render), the publisher of a local crime rag: “A fucking white man that cares. Sad as hell.”

The Lowdown is also quite the showcase for Harjo’s creative vision. His world-building is lush enough to smooth over however you may feel about Lee’s rough edges, and his gift for seamlessly weaving together his expansive cultural appetites gives the show a kind of referential heft that feels inviting as opposed to alienating. It draws on and echoes the great noirs (The Long Goodbye comes to mind) but also the paranoid fictions of someone like Philip K. Dick. You feel the echoes even if you’re not familiar with the reference. Jim Thompson, the Oklahoma crime writer whose reputation flourished only after his death, surfaces as a touchpoint in the notes Dale leaves behind, and hearing the name makes you curious enough to pick up one of his novels. The show sparkles with wit, sharp dialogue (“a faint heart never fucked a bobcat”), and a gallery of memorable, organically diverse characters populating Harjo’s Tulsa. And it finds real magic in small moments. Midway through the pilot, Lee meets Marty (Keith David), a stranger with as much literary flair as Lee has himself. They parry verbally until Marty tilts the encounter toward reflection. “Something brings us to Sweet Emily’s at this hour,” he muses, regarding the other insomniacs in the diner. “Look around.” The camera lingers: a cup of coffee, a man reading his Bible, rain streaking the window — a portrait of nighthawks. Lee shrugs it off. “Just a bunch of night owls, that’s all I see.” Marty corrects him: “No. You see poetry.” In this beat, the show’s essence is crystallized.

In more ways than one, The Lowdown deepens and extends Harjo’s sensibilities. If Reservation Dogs found beauty in the embrace of community in the margins, The Lowdown draws its spark from what happens when someone in the margins starts to poke back at entrenched power. Both shows wander and amble toward something more than the sum of their parts, and both find beauty and meaning lingering in the details. The heart of noir tends to be nihilism, its abyssal mood a veil that invites you to glimpse the darker machinery of a world ruled by insurmountable powers where resistance leads only to ruin. But Harjo complicates that. “The way you write about Tulsa — there’s bad things about it, but underneath, it’s really good,” Francis tells Lee. He may be a fool, but he’s also a lover who continues to believe in the truth. It may yet end badly for him, but for the moment, he makes you believe there’s still glory in the fight to fix a broken world.