Ethan Hawke is hilariously raccoon-like in The Lowdown; not just because his hair is all scraggly grey-and-black, and usually in various states of disarray depending on whether his Lee Raybon is crawling out from the wrong side of the bed or the trunk of some neo-Nazi\u2019s car.<\/p>\n
A freelance journalist by trade (among other things), Lee is the self-appointed gumshoe in creator Sterlin Harjo\u2019s deliciously pulpy and deceptively lighthearted noir caper. He sniffs around Tulsa, Oklahoma, digs through people\u2019s trash, repeatedly makes a mess of things and mostly gets hostile responses from the people who have the misfortune of crossing paths with him (pretty much the world a raccoon lives in). But, every so often, someone will find Lee adorable or sympathetic enough that they just might lend him a helping hand, or even take him to bed with them.<\/p>\n
Hawke is teaming with Harjo again in the eight-part series (of which critics received five episodes), after appearing in the latter\u2019s Peabody-winning Reservation Dogs. He\u2019s predictably terrific in the role, playing Lee as a rascal who we simultaneously root for and are embarrassed by. He\u2019s a self-righteous narcissist who calls himself Tulsa\u2019s \u201ctruthstorian\u201d. He\u2019s always the first to toot his own horn whenever he accomplishes something (anything), even if there\u2019s no one around for him to share the satisfaction with. His mission to clean house around Tulsa \u2013 taking on white supremacists, crooked real estate developers and local politicians, who may all be in bed with each other \u2013 is perhaps Lee\u2019s way to distract from how much of a disaster he\u2019s created in his own home.<\/p>\n
Lee is short on both child support payments \u2013 owed to his ever-patient ex Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn) \u2013 and payroll at the local bookstore he owns. He tries to make ends meet with gigs at local magazines, whether they print news or nudes. He\u2019ll take the paycheck from whoever is willing to publish his unflattering articles about the rich and\/or racist in Tulsa. For Lee, these stories are meant to kick up a storm so that he could wade through the aftermath for more answers.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There\u2019s beauty to the chaos that fuels and follows Lee, a guy who arranges the inventory at his bookstore so that Harold Pinter sits next to Harry Potter. Crass as that pairing may seem, it\u2019s of a piece with The Lowdown, which makes a melody out of the discordant tones and myriad influences that it has on tap.<\/p>\n
This series is drunk on the Coen brothers, David Lynch and Raymond Chandler. Harjo and his writing team also tip their hat to Jim Thompson, the crime fiction writer, and Oklahoma native, whose hardboiled stories \u2013 about sordid affairs, double-crosses and murders involving Texas oil and construction magnates \u2013 are a literal plot device in The Lowdown. Lee finds clues to this mystery, surrounding the possible murder of a member of Oklahoma\u2019s elite (Tim Blake Nelson, as twangy as ever), buried in those paperbacks\u2019 pages.<\/p>\n
The Lowdown isn\u2019t just in conversation with those influences, but also, in compelling ways, Harjo\u2019s Reservation Dogs. The earlier series was an achingly beautiful slacker comedy about teens from Muscogee (Creek) Nation who bounce around their tight-knit community as it heals from loss and intergenerational trauma. Reservation Dogs broke new ground for (long overdue) Indigenous representation, being led and mostly populated by people from the community, without ever feeling burdened by its own significance. Over three seasons, the series stayed inventive and light on its feet, absorbed local culture and character, tinkered with genres and eclipsed virtually everything else on television.<\/p>\n
The Lowdown, which retains the same playfulness, is a whole new kind of flex for Harjo, a curious victory lap in this new terrain he\u2019s forged. The Oklahoma native made the new series (with a lot of returning cast and crew) about a white man, flipping the more common and usually exploitative equation, where settler film-makers tell Indigenous stories. Watching the way white people move through an Indigenous lens turns out to be a far more rewarding experience; not just when it comes to all the crooked politicians and backroom schemers in The Lowdown.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also Hawke\u2019s Lee, who behaves a bit like a white saviour, with that narcissistic air about him. When Lee grills fellow Oklahomans about their ignorance or predatory ways, you can\u2019t help but clock the grandstanding, and how much that performed allyship does for his own ego and sense of purpose.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s as good as it gets when it comes to allies, the show seems to say, not in a deflated or cynical way, but with a generous warmth and sense of hope that\u2019s clear-eyed and practical about how noble work gets done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke is hilariously raccoon-like in The Lowdown; not just because his hair is all scraggly grey-and-black, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-163990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}