PRAIRIE NOIR

Ethan Hawke plays an investigative reporter in a new series from the creator of Reservation Dogs

- JUDY BERMAN

THERE'S NOTHING WORSE THAN A WHITE MAN who cares.” A character named Marty, played by the great Keith David, issues this lament in the premiere episode of the FX crime drama The Lowdown. The white man in question is the show’s protagonist, Lee Raybon, an anticorruption crusader investigating a powerful family in his home city of Tulsa, Okla. And although Marty may be the first to diagnose his affliction, he is not the only person of color in this story who suspects our hero’s bravery and righteousness—traits that those who doubt him might call foolhardiness and sanctimony—stem, in part, from his privilege. Whether this means he’s uniquely positioned to topple Goliaths or bound to lose and too blithely self-assured to realize it remains to be seen.

His predicament combines the perspectives of two Lowdown executive producers: creator Sterlin Harjo, best known for the transcendent FX coming-of-age dramedy Reservation Dogs, and Ethan Hawke, who stars as Lee. A self-styled “truthstorian,” which is a quirky way of saying he’s an investigative journalist bent on exposing historical injustices, Lee is shambolic, tenacious, hyperliterate yet earthy, and a bit wild-eyed, with a paucity of concern for his own safety and a searing social conscience. Characters like this have become Hawke’s specialty. The 2018 film First Reformed cast him as a minister whose painful past coalesces with an environmentalist awakening in an epic crisis of faith. His performance here most recalls his tragicomic portrayal of John Brown, the heroic but unhinged abolitionist whose quixotic raid on Harpers Ferry helped catalyze the Civil War, in Showtime’s 2020 adaptation of James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. That The Lowdown makes passing reference to Brown is surely no coincidence.