“The Lowdown” Is a Noir for Our Era

Some actors you can watch doing the same thing over and over again. Cary Grant built a career on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made an art form of falling apart with tragic intensity. Lately, Ethan Hawke has joined their ranks: the onetime Gen X heartthrob has reinvented himself in middle age as a character actor with impeccable taste in auteurist projects. His specialty is now the heedless hero whose certainty about his righteousness drives him to extremes. In Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, “First Reformed,” the actor was spellbinding as a clergyman radicalized by environmental destruction, which he regards as humanity’s defilement of God’s creation. Hawke then delivered one of the best TV performances of the past decade as the militant abolitionist John Brown in the 2020 adaptation of James McBride’s novel “The Good Lord Bird.” The archetype is, of course, familiar—but Hawke imbues each of these characters with infectious zeal and a solemn, even sacred, severity.

The new series “The Lowdown,” on FX, offers him another role in that irresistible mold. Its creator, the Native American writer and director Sterlin Harjo, has worked with Hawke before, on his landmark show “Reservation Dogs”; here, Hawke is cast as an indefatigable Tulsa journalist named Lee Raybon. From the start, it’s evident that Lee’s single-minded pursuit of the truth comes at a personal cost. His wife has left him, and his relationship with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), is correspondingly shaky. His income, such as it is, is cobbled together from bookselling, freelance reporting, and flipping the odd work of art. He routinely gets beaten or abducted by subjects who resent his coverage. But Lee is the kind of crusader who inspires more bemusement than admiration from those around him. When a neo-Nazi breaks into his home, burns him with a cigarette, and rails against his “shitty fucking newspaper,” he can’t help but reply, “It’s a long-form magazine!” Even a loyal reader of his work says, with a sigh, “There’s nothing worse than a white man who cares.”

Lee is loosely based on the self-taught historian Lee Roy Chapman, a citizen journalist who unearthed the involvement of one of Tulsa’s founding fathers, Tate Brady, in the city’s 1921 race massacre. Chapman, who died in 2015, at the age of forty-six, was a friend of Harjo’s, as well as a colleague of his at the Oklahoma-based This Land Press. Like the character he inspired, Chapman was a Jack-of-all-trades and a dealer of rare books. But the similarities more or less end there. “The Lowdown” is a noir above all else, and the fictional Lee is unfettered by basic journalistic ethics: when he finds a stack of hundred-dollar bills in a skinhead’s car, he has no qualms about treating it like a winning lottery ticket.

The show opens with the death of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the black sheep in a powerful Tulsa family, whose brother, Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), is in the midst of a gubernatorial run. We hear, but don’t see, the fatal gunshot. Though Dale’s passing is ruled a suicide, it becomes apparent that plenty of people had reason to want him gone. Lee, who’s just published an exposé about the Washbergs’ ill-gotten wealth, is eager to write a follow-up. His editor advises against it. Lee’s no tough guy: he’s enough of an aesthete to recognize a Joe Brainard painting on a supper-club wall. But, as the genre demands, he keeps trying to get closer to the center of the action.

“The Lowdown” is a more conventional outing than “Reservation Dogs,” which was energized by its formal unpredictability. Lee’s adventures hew closer to a sun-drenched “Fargo,” adhering to the beats of a traditional crime drama—albeit a stylish one—with professional hit men and hard-won clues. Dale, who was closeted at the time of his death, leaves behind notes stashed inside his treasured first-edition books hinting that his wife (Jeanne Tripplehorn) may have had something to do with his ostensible suicide. Donald also stood to benefit from his brother’s disappearance. Lee, in turn, becomes obsessed with finding Dale’s killer, and his investigation garners unwanted attention from neo-Nazi thugs and the fleece-vested moneymen who employ them. It also makes him a persona non grata among the Washbergs, particularly after he crashes a memorial for Dale in search of leads. As Lee is kicked out by security for picking a fight with Donald, he screams, accurately, if not quite justifiably, “A vote for Donald Washberg is a vote for white supremacy!”

In recent years, Oklahoma has emerged as a pop-cultural locus for America’s hidden racial sins. The 2019 HBO miniseries “Watchmen” and Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” address not only the state’s history of murderously displacing Black and Native communities but also the systematic erasure of such atrocities. (“Watchmen” depicts the race massacre that Chapman investigated, in which white rioters killed as many as three hundred Black residents and decimated their once prosperous neighborhood.) “The Lowdown,” at least in the five episodes allotted to critics, doesn’t dig as deep as those earlier works; Harjo’s show seems more focussed on visual flair, with a brown-toned palette that nods to the New Hollywood era and helps collapse the past and the present. Still, the series deftly links Donald’s political agenda to a centuries-long struggle: the latest instance of élites embracing both official and extralegal violence to consolidate power.

Harjo, with his eye for human eccentricities, lends a pulse to stock types—chief among them a poetry-loving private investigator named Marty (Keith David). Gradually, as on “Reservation Dogs,” a crew of kooks, knuckleheads, ne’er-do-wells, and melancholics takes shape. The rapper Killer Mike makes the most of his limited screen time as the no-nonsense publisher of a local tabloid that prints Lee’s more lowbrow, retaliatory material, including the mug shots and criminal histories of some goons who assaulted him. A pair of freshly paroled cousins, supposedly affiliated with the Indian mafia, become Lee’s unlikely (and highly ineffectual) security guards; when he asks them to dispose of a vehicle that could tie him to a double murder, they set it on fire, then use the wreckage as the backdrop for a music video. And we get a glimpse of Lee’s life before the Washbergs when a former colleague, Wendell (Peter Dinklage), ropes him into an annual ritual that involves confessing their shortcomings in remembrance of a fallen friend. It’s the kind of sequence at which Harjo, whose previous series illustrated the layers of grief and guilt that bind survivors of a tragedy, excels. Noting Wendell’s depression and resentment, Lee confesses, “It’s scary to be your friend.” The self-destructive Lee’s loved ones might say the same about him.