Ethan Hawke’s Brilliantly Exasperating Quest for Truth

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.