HARD NEWS

"The Lowdown," on FX.

- BY INKOO KANG

Some actors you can watch doing the same thing over and over again. Cary Grant built a career on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made an art form of falling apart with tragic intensity. Lately, Ethan Hawke has joined their ranks: the onetime Gen X heartthrob has reinvented himself in middle age as a character actor with impeccable taste in auteurist projects. His specialty is now the heedless hero whose certainty about his righteousness drives him to extremes. In Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, “First Reformed,” the actor was spellbinding as a clergyman radicalized by environmental destruction, which he regards as humanity’s defilement of God’s creation. Hawke then delivered one of the best TV performances of the past decade as the militant abolitionist John Brown in the 2020 adaptation of James McBride’s novel “The Good Lord Bird.” The archetype is, of course, familiar—but Hawke imbues each of these characters with infectious zeal and a solemn, even sacred, severity.

The new series “The Lowdown,” on FX, offers him another role in that irresistible mold. Its creator, the Native American writer and director Sterlin Harjo, has worked with Hawke before, on his landmark show