Lee Raybon, Ethan Hawke’s self -proclaimed “truth -storian” in the center of Sterlin Harjo’s Wadding southern noir, so often bruises, bloody or bandaged that when friends and family express concern about his discontinued state, their confusion is almost as shocking as his blow. Is he not … always like this? Doesn’t he sadden the garbage and picks a fight? Isn’t it part of his Roguish, Renegade charm?
Answers in reverse, it is, he does and he is not. The shock that is shown by those closest to Lee reminds us that although he can be our bullheaded, looked hero – sighting through good looking criminals and seeds authorities to find the cold, common truth, regardless of cost – he is also just a guy. A writer. A citizen. A father. Within “Lowdown,” Lee must be regularly reminded of these facts, of his own mortality or risk losing one’s mind (and perhaps his life) to his own mythology.
How Harjo and Hawke dance between the two extremes – to build the legend of Lee even when protecting his basic humanity – makes their modern mystery a crunching genre story and a captivating story for itself. Filled with daydreaming features that are still founded in the details of the daily grinding, “The decline“Is an audience needle and Weirdo’s joy at once.
It begins, as these stories tend to, with a dead body. On a lone night, Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson) sits in his casing, looks over the shoulder through the back window and ends up with a ball in the brain. Coroner regulates it as a suicide (and we are not showed how the deadly wound became exactly), but Lee does not buy it. Of course he would not. Lee wrote just an exposure to the Washberg family, and it was nobody too kind. Some even blame Lee for Dale’s suicide – a view that his brother, Donald (Kyle Maclachlan), is pleased to encourage. He prepares to drive for governor, and skeletons running from wardrobes does not tend to attract votes. It is better (and easier) to discredit a Wayward writer than to deal with the charges in Lee’s flattering family portrait.
Still, Dale’s passing seems a bit … comfortable. He was the family’s black sheep-long time to be gay despite his wife-friend-widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn) -dale always threw up road blocks to Washberg’s financial plans. With him out of the way, Donald’s path to power is clear, along with some other facade roads that old money is happy to cruise.
So Lee does what he does best: he starts sticking around. Among the disturbed parties are Marty (Keith David), a private investigator who visits the same restaurant as Lee; Frank Martin (Tracy Letts), the owner of a construction company Lee accusing illegally underwent the competition (and running black entrepreneurs from Tulsa); Allen Murphy (Scott Shepherd), Frank’s right man who specializes in keeping his boss’s hands clean; And a couple of skinheads upset over Lee including their name in a story about burning a synagogue.
However, Lee does not just have enemies. His Gregarious personality gives him good enough for a good personal society, starting with his daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). The teenager loves and admires his father and offers to help with his work often at the expense of his own (home) work, and Lee is usually happy to have an encouraging second-in-command. Her mother, Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn), however, Lee knows better than anyone else, and keeps an eye on how involved their children comes in their typically reckless adventures.
Lee also owns a bookstore, Hoot OWL books and uses a desktop office called Deidra (Siena East) to keep the lights on while running around and writes stories. Still, he is often enough to maintain friendly relationships with his neighbors in the record store, the lawyer’s office and said diners. (Shout-out to Production Designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly.) They keep an eye on each other, as well as the more distant antique dealer, Ray (Michael Hitchcock) and the editor of Tulsa Beat, a local crime newspaper, Cyrus (Michael “Killer Mike” renders).
The buzzing sound of people who share their lives is one of “The Lowdown’s” biggest strengths (held in urgent harmony with JD McPherson’s lively point). Lee is surrounded by big and small yet always distinct personalities. (Maclachlan’s sharp two-face turn in combination with the sporadic rural settings and strange etheric intervals are bound to induce Lynchian comparisons, although this series is much more simple than “Twin Peaks.”) Tulsa Townies can be comforting or scare, but they are always there. City, clearly established to support many future mysteries in many upcoming seasons. (It’s better, at least.)
Hawke is North Star. In his only former TV Excursion as an executive producer and star, Showtime’s magnificent customization of James McBride’s “The good Lord Bird,” Hawke played John Brown, the burning abolition that refused to back up from his principles, even when they set him in conflict with a literal army of opposition. Here, Hawke is once again driven by an unreasonable conviction, and he has once again faced significant resistance. Instead of crossing to end slavery (his mission from God), he is a “truthful”, who is fighting against the good struggle to keep people informed. “I read things, I do research things, I drive around and find things. Then I write about things,” he says by defining his chosen moniker. “Some people care, some people don’t. I’m chronically unemployed, always broken, but let’s just say I’m obsessed with the truth.”
That obsession gives Hawke lots of opportunities to roam his intelligible things, just as he did throughout “The Good Lord Bird” (and was built to another exemplary performance from the 2000s about a man’s sacrificial family for his guiding purpose, “First reformed”). These scenes are a transfixing treatment, with the passionate actor who releases to best convey the sound of his character, but “The Letdown” also offers Hawke a chance to flex its chameleonic charisma.
Lee is quick to recognize what his audience needs to hear. If he talks to the troubled mother to a white supremacist, he will humor terse stories about how her son helped him through a tough prison. If he’s negotiations with a heart -breaking fisherman who may or may not have murderous tendencies, he will put out his own story about woe with such explicit detail that it does not doubt that the two men see themselves in each other. If he needs to join a woman who is desperate after a wild night in the city, yes, he can fuck for sure do it too.
Whether you call it adaptability, versatility or just plain lie, it is an important attribute for many TV detectives, and the best is realized by actors who know how to find the line between acting within their character and turning their character into an actor. Hawke never breaks from Lee. He never uses these scenes as an opportunity to show off. He never even betrays the character’s core traffic of the truth at all costs.
In this way, he builds Lee in a legend, without ever losing his breath that brings him to life.
Rating: A-
“The Lowdown” premiered on Thursday 4 September at the Toronto International Film Festival. The series debuts Tuesday, September 23 at 21 o’clock at FX. New episodes are released every week and are on Hulu the day after they are broadcast.
