“The Lowdown” Is a Noir for Our Period

Some actors you may watch doing the identical factor time and again. Cary Grant constructed a profession on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made an artwork type of falling aside with tragic depth. Lately, Ethan Hawke has joined their ranks: the onetime Gen X heartthrob has reinvented himself in center age as a personality actor with impeccable style in auteurist initiatives. His specialty is now the heedless hero whose certainty about his righteousness drives him to extremes. In Paul Schrader’s 2017 movie, “First Reformed,” the actor was spellbinding as a priest radicalized by environmental destruction, which he regards as humanity’s defilement of God’s creation. Hawke then delivered the most effective TV performances of the previous decade because the militant abolitionist John Brown within the 2020 adaptation of James McBride’s novel “The Good Lord Bird.” The archetype is, in fact, acquainted—however Hawke imbues every of those characters with infectious zeal and a solemn, even sacred, severity.

The new sequence “The Lowdown,” on FX, presents him one other position in that impossible to resist mildew. Its creator, the Native American author and director Sterlin Harjo, has labored with Hawke earlier than, on his landmark present “Reservation Dogs”; right here, Hawke is solid as an indefatigable Tulsa journalist named Lee Raybon. From the beginning, it’s evident that Lee’s single-minded pursuit of the reality comes at a private value. His spouse has left him, and his relationship along with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), is correspondingly shaky. His earnings, similar to it’s, is cobbled collectively from bookselling, freelance reporting, and flipping the odd murals. He routinely will get crushed or kidnapped by topics who resent his protection. But Lee is the form of crusader who conjures up extra bemusement than admiration from these round him. When a neo-Nazi breaks into his residence, burns him with a cigarette, and rails towards his “shitty fucking newspaper,” he can’t assist however 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 primarily based on the self-taught historian Lee Roy Chapman, a citizen journalist who unearthed the involvement of considered one of Tulsa’s founding fathers, Tate Brady, within the metropolis’s 1921 race bloodbath. Chapman, who died in 2015, on the age of forty-six, was a buddy of Harjo’s, in addition to a colleague of his on the Oklahoma-based This Land Press. Like the character he impressed, Chapman was a Jack-of-all-trades and a seller of uncommon books. But the similarities roughly finish there. “The Lowdown” is a noir above all else, and the fictional Lee is unfettered by primary journalistic ethics: when he finds a stack of hundred-dollar payments in a skinhead’s automobile, he has no qualms about treating it like a profitable lottery ticket.

The present opens with the dying of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the black sheep in a strong Tulsa household, whose brother, Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), is within the midst of a gubernatorial run. We hear, however don’t see, the deadly gunshot. Though Dale’s passing is dominated a suicide, it turns into obvious that loads of folks had purpose to need him gone. Lee, who’s simply printed an exposé concerning the Washbergs’ ill-gotten wealth, is raring to put in writing a follow-up. His editor advises towards it. Lee’s no robust man: he’s sufficient of an aesthete to acknowledge a Joe Brainard portray on a supper-club wall. But, because the style calls for, he retains attempting to get nearer to the middle of the motion.

“The Lowdown” is a extra standard outing than “Reservation Dogs,” which was energized by its formal unpredictability. Lee’s adventures hew nearer to a sun-drenched “Fargo,” adhering to the beats of a conventional crime drama—albeit a trendy one—with skilled hit males and hard-won clues. Dale, who was closeted on the time of his dying, leaves behind notes stashed inside his treasured first-edition books hinting that his spouse (Jeanne Tripplehorn) could have had one thing to do along with his ostensible suicide. Donald additionally stood to profit from his brother’s disappearance. Lee, in flip, turns into obsessive about discovering Dale’s killer, and his investigation garners undesirable consideration from neo-Nazi thugs and the fleece-vested moneymen who make use of them. It additionally makes him a persona non grata among the many Washbergs, significantly after he crashes a memorial for Dale looking for leads. As Lee is kicked out by safety for choosing a combat with Donald, he screams, precisely, if not fairly justifiably, “A vote for Donald Washberg is a vote for white supremacy!”

In latest 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 movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” handle not solely the state’s historical past of murderously displacing Black and Native communities but additionally the systematic erasure of such atrocities. (“Watchmen” depicts the race bloodbath that Chapman investigated, wherein white rioters killed as many as 300 Black residents and decimated their as soon as affluent neighborhood.) “The Lowdown,” a minimum of within the 5 episodes allotted to critics, doesn’t dig as deep as these earlier works; Harjo’s present appears extra focussed on visible aptitude, with a brown-toned palette that nods to the New Hollywood period and helps collapse the previous and the current. Still, the sequence deftly hyperlinks Donald’s political agenda to a centuries-long battle: the most recent occasion of élites embracing each official and extralegal violence to consolidate energy.

Harjo, along with his eye for human eccentricities, lends a pulse to inventory sorts—chief amongst them a poetry-loving non-public investigator named Marty (Keith David). Gradually, as on “Reservation Dogs,” a crew of kooks, knuckleheads, ne’er-do-wells, and melancholics takes form. The rapper Killer Mike makes essentially the most of his restricted display time because the no-nonsense writer of an area tabloid that prints Lee’s extra lowbrow, retaliatory materials, together with the mug photographs and prison histories of some goons who assaulted him. A pair of freshly paroled cousins, supposedly affiliated with the Indian mafia, grow to be Lee’s unlikely (and extremely ineffectual) safety guards; when he asks them to get rid of a car that might tie him to a double homicide, they set it on hearth, then use the wreckage because the backdrop for a music video. And we get a glimpse of Lee’s life earlier than the Washbergs when a former colleague, Wendell (Peter Dinklage), ropes him into an annual ritual that entails confessing their shortcomings in remembrance of a fallen buddy. It’s the form of sequence at which Harjo, whose earlier sequence illustrated the layers of grief and guilt that bind survivors of a tragedy, excels. Noting Wendell’s melancholy and resentment, Lee confesses, “It’s scary to be your friend.” The self-destructive Lee’s family members would possibly say the identical about him.