Jean-Luc Godard once said that there are two kinds of directors. The first kind knows exactly what they're looking for and always aims the camera right there. Alfred Hitchcock may be the supreme version of this. The second kind have wandering eyes that keep searching for unexpected flashes of life.
That perfectly describes Sterlin Harjo, the Native American writer and director whose first TV series Reservation Dogs was one of the great shows of the new millennium. Focusing on teenagers from the Muscogee Nation in rural Oklahoma, this groundbreaking series was more circuitous than plotted, yet episode after episode made you laugh out loud or broke your heart.
It's never easy to follow up on a triumph, and I was anxious for Harjo when I heard that his new FX show was a neo-noir story set in present-day Tulsa. Would his drifty, digressive approach work with a crime story? The answer is yes. The Lowdown, as it's titled, uses its murder plot to create a world crackling with humor and sadness and, well, danger.
Ethan Hawke stars as Lee Raybon, a used bookstore owner who moonlights as a muckraking reporter and calls himself a "Truthstorian." (He drives around in a white van that bears the message, "You're doing it wrong.") When a son of a powerful Tulsa family supposedly dies by suicide, Lee smells a rat and begins investigating. He's barely begun when he finds himself targeted by neo-Nazis he's called out in print; threatened by the dead man's brother, Donald, a gubernatorial candidate played by with slippery ease by Kyle MacLachlan; and tailed by a mystery-man named Marty — that's nifty Keith David, the voice of a million documentaries.
Along the way, Lee gets involved with a cornucopia of other characters: the dead man's wife, a gossipy antiques dealer, hard-partying cops, caviar counterfeiters — yes, you read that correctly — and the sardonic publisher of a local Black newspaper who says of Lee, "There's nothing worse than a white man who cares."
Meanwhile Lee's ex-wife is about to get remarried, and he's desperate to stay close to his teenage daughter Francis, warmly played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who finds her loner dad both absurd and admirable.
Harjo is steeped in American pop culture, from the Jim Thompson paperbacks that become a plot point to his pointed use of Oklahoma musicians like Leon Russell and Chet Baker. And surely he knows his Coen Brothers. Watching The Lowdown, I kept thinking of Fargo — with its desolate open spaces, oddball humor, and crazy-quilt of tones. Yet there's more than a whiff of The Big Lebowski here, too. Occasionally fuddled and perpetually disheveled, Hawke's Lee could almost be the smart, idealistic brother of Jeff Bridges' "The Dude."
While Hawke's full-throttle performance carries the show — my, he's gotten good — Harjo knows how to keep the other characters surprising. When we first see the dead man's widow — a role nailed by Jeanne Tripplehorn — we think her cold-hearted and scheming. But during a night drinking with Lee, we discover she's something far more complicated. When Peter Dinklage turns up as Lee's great frenemy, Wendell, their day-long encounter begins with the two swapping barbs but then eases into a moving portrait of failure and disillusionment.
Because Harjo is something of a truthstorian himself, The Lowdown isn't shy about pointing out the pain at the heart of Tulsa's history — most notoriously, its 1921 race massacre. Indeed, Lee's bedroom wall is papered with articles about local historical cruelties.
Yet Harjo is no hater. He's blessed with a sense of tenderness toward his characters and toward the multicultural Tulsa where he makes his home. He shoots this unglamorous city with knowing affection, from its junky shops and Lee's local diner, Sweet Emily's, to the deserted nighttime streets where, as Lee's headlights approach, you can see a cat skitter across the road. We sense that Harjo's view of Tulsa is akin to Lee's: "There's bad things about it but underneath it's really good."
One might say the same of this series, which occasionally meanders or misfires, but whose every episode is bracingly alive. A genuinely life-affirming artist, Harjo turns Lee Raybon's Tulsa into an unexpectedly marvelous place. The Lowdown isn't merely a good show. It's also a really good hang.
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