In prestige mystery series these days, women tend to be on the case. When I think of the detectives or private investigators or nosy reporters of the past decade of TV, I mostly think of the supercompetent female lead, digging into a hometown mystery. Perhaps she’s got pressing and complicated personal problems, perhaps she’s a little too close to the case, perhaps she’s wearing a parka. Either way, she’s not happy. There’s Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown, Jodie Foster and Kali Reis in True Detective: Night Country, Amy Adams in Sharp Objects, Regina King in Watchmen, Cush Jumbo in Criminal Record, Tamara Lawrance in Get Millie Black, Rebecca Ferguson in Silo, Emma Corrin in Murder at the End of the World, Amanda Seyfried in Long Bright River, Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone in Under the Bridge, Elisabeth Moss in at least three different shows, and on and on. Steely eyed and lethal in their pursuit of truth, these women are figuring it out.
The Lowdown, a Tulsa-based neo-noir from Sterlin Harjo, the creator of Reservation Dogs, features a familiar, but increasingly rare, type of investigator. Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is more bleary than steely eyed in his pursuit of the truth, less lethal and more loquacious. Whereas the women detectives habitually wrestle with the line between personal and professional, Lee Raybon is simply not a professional in the first place. A rare book dealer and writer, Raybon calls himself a “truthstorian.” What that means is that he’s a conspiracy theorist whose conspiracies happen to usually be true. When we meet him, he’s just published a long-form, deep-dive, archivally sourced takedown of the Washberg family, a dynasty of Tulsa power brokers with plenty of skeletons and maybe even white hoods in their closets. An anti-racist, anti-capitalist gadfly, he styles himself as a little more and a little less than a journalist.
Indeed, his investigative procedure is largely based on annoying his subjects until they confess their crimes. His Tulsa is diverse, dangerous, and teeming with life. Every street scene feels deeply specific, every storefront has a real person inside it. In one scene, a country band is playing outside an antiques mall, and the camera just hangs around for a minute to watch them play. Harjo has described the show as a “love letter to Tulsa,” but Raybon is its messy messenger. You may want to shoot him.
Much of your experience of the show will likely hinge on whether you find Ethan Hawke irreplaceable or irritating. For much of the 1990s, Hawke created characters in the space between magnetism and repulsion. In films like Reality Bites, Before Sunset, and even Hamlet, he perfected portraits of men whose gargantuan self-regard gave way to toxic charisma. An icon of Gen X performative nonconformity, Hawke knows how to stylishly wear a red flag. As he has aged, Hawke has wielded this swaggering self-righteousness in a striking variety of ways: as tragedy in First Reformed, as comic heroism in The Good Lord Bird, and now as wily integrity in The Lowdown. A man once said—in The Big Lebowski, a film that’s clearly influenced Harjo’s work here—“you’re not wrong … you’re just an asshole,” and that right there is the dramatic dilemma of The Lowdown. Can the quest for truth, in 2025, survive the cringiness of its most loyal servants? Can the wrong guy finally do the right thing?
The Lowdown is a thoughtful, shambling neo-noir that’s only occasionally, itself, a shambles. And, as in any great noir, the plot doesn’t really make all that much sense. At the beginning of the series, we meet Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the black sheep of a large family that has been pulling the levers of power in Oklahoma for generations. He sits alone in his dark study and narrates a suicide note about the corruption of the Washberg clan (also possibly: klan) before putting a gun to his temple and blowing his brains out. That note, which Washberg has written out in serial installments and distributed among a set of first-edition paperback novels written by the Oklahoman pulp-fiction pioneer Jim Thompson, falls into Raybon’s hands, and we’re off to the races. Raybon believes Washberg was not responsible for his own death, and he’s determined to find out first, how that could possibly be true, and second, whodunit.
What unfolds from there is a kind of slurry of Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, and The Big Lebowski, a revision of revisionist film noirs. And Raybon himself is an appealingly aggravating mash-up of Jack Nicholson’s rakish charm, Elliott Gould’s jazzed-out ambivalence, and Jeff Bridges’s disarming dunderheadedness. His insatiable need to unravel conspiracy—or maybe just to go where he’s been told not to—leads possibly to the truth at the rotten core of present-day Tulsa but possibly also nowhere in particular.
As a result, the show’s plot manifests less as a precision-crafted narrative mechanism and more as a collection of characters, each of whom represents some visible facet of a much larger, unseen malevolence. There’s Donald Washberg (a slithery Kyle MacLachlan), Dale’s brother, who is both running for governor of Oklahoma and sleeping with Dale’s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn). There’s Allen Murphy (Scott Shepherd), an executive at a villainous-seeming corporation, who wears a fleece vest, speaks in threatening euphemisms, and keeps a pair of skinhead goons on retainer. And there’s Marty (Keith David), the private eye who’s both working for his old friend Donald and trying to keep Raybon out of trouble. All of these figures are connected, though to what end is unclear.
As Raybon tries to figure all that out, he takes us on a picaresque tour of Tulsa. We encounter not one but two independently owned local periodicals that can miraculously afford to pay freelancers; vicious rival antiques dealers; a witch who lives on a houseboat; a cabal of fishermen who run a lucrative caviar fraud operation; and an ever-expanding network of people who, at some point or another, all served time in prison. Just as on Reservation Dogs, the vast ensemble cast features characters with overlapping identities and social positions, but none of them are made to represent any universal experience. They’re just Lee Raybon’s neighbors.
Despite that broadly textured landscape, Raybon remains the show’s center—its most compelling and meaningful mystery. It’s hard to tell, for instance, if Raybon’s obsession with the truth is a virtue or a vice. He frames his quest in conspicuously heroic terms, but his recklessness causes trouble for nearly everyone around him. When he finds a big pile of drug money left unattended, he snags it without thinking and then proceeds to distribute it, like Robin Hood, to friends, debtors, and needy strangers. He might be putting them in danger, too; he might be simply recognizing that everyone in Tulsa is always already in danger; or he might be drastically underestimating the degree to which his privilege insulates him from the kind of risk that might ruin someone else. So, while the corruption he seeks to root out is undoubtedly real, this White Hat’s white hat is a little dirty from overuse.
The place where this really resonates is in Raybon’s relationship with his teenage daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who lives with Raybon’s ex. The two make a cute buddy cop team, the inquisitive and impressionable young kid and the gruff, cuddly mentor, teaching her the weird ways of the truthstorian. But, on the other hand, the line between education and exploitation is sometimes too thin to see. When Raybon drags Francis along on his misadventures, are we watching wholesome father-daughter high jinks or a dad who can’t stop thinking about himself long enough to spend quality time with his own daughter? Does he take her seriously enough to deal her into his obsessions, or is she only interesting to him if she’s interested in his kooky nonsense?
At one point, abandoned by her father (who’s actually been kidnapped for the second time in two days), Francis goes to talk with one of the feuding antiques dealers. Francis says that Raybon loves Jim Thompson novels, to which the antiques dealer replies, “Must be a deadbeat.” “He’s a good dad,” Francis returns, “or he tries to be.” They sit and share a cup of tea as Francis continues to explain and defend her dad’s actions that day. At the end, she sighs. “It sounds kinda bad when I say it out loud,” she says. “It does,” the antiques dealer says.
When Harjo’s Reservation Dogs premiered in 2021, it came along at the tail end of what had been the Anti-Hero Age of American television. Seemingly every series was concerned with the moral ambiguity and complicated depth of feeling to be found in bad guys. Rez Dogs was refreshing for lots of reasons—its extraordinary cast of young Indigenous actors, its frank and bracing spirituality, its lack of investment in plot, its willingness to go off on tangents. But one of the main reasons it felt so new was that, for once, it was a show that didn’t care about the interiority of evil men or the ethical trade-offs of powerful women. The protagonists of Rez Dogs were just regular people.
This time, though, Harjo is tacking the other way. What if there were a show concerned with the moral ambiguity and complicated depth of feeling that could be found in what passes for a hero? Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and one of the chief auteurs of anti-heroism, recently speculated about the potential of this kind of show. In a speech before the Writers Guild of America, Gilligan reflected on how villains like Walter White escaped from the critical context of their television shows to become almost aspirational figures, how TV’s obsession with bad guys had led to, at best, artistic homogeneity, and, at worst, gradual deterioration of the television audience’s conscience. “Maybe what the world needs now are some good, old-fashioned, Greatest Generation types who give more than they take,” he said. “Who think that kindness, tolerance and sacrifice aren’t strictly for chumps.”
With The Lowdown, Harjo is embarked upon a somewhat humbler adjacent quest with, in my view, a much higher ceiling. If it was naïve to think that contemporary viewers wouldn’t grow to love and admire Walter White, it might be just as naïve to think that the purity Gilligan describes could convey a meaningful truth to those same viewers. The Lowdown is interested in goodness, but not the mythology of it so much as its actual practice. Lee Raybon is an exasperating rascal with a virtuous heart and a point of view that’s as shrewdly perceptive as it is oblivious. But, as the man says, he’s not wrong. He’s just trying.
The post Ethan Hawke’s Brilliantly Exasperating Quest for Truth appeared first on New Republic.
