The Sensitive Kind

To come of age in the late '80s and early '90s was to be subjected to a battery of Ethan Hawke movies, most of which found him playing characters who were meant to be sensitive and erudite but could often, if you were a certain type of viewer, come across as self-regarding and insufferably long-winded. I'm not sure exactly when I landed in that camp, but it may have been the moment in Reality Bites when his character says "I have this planet of regrets sitting on my shoulders," which prompted what I was sure would be a theater full of audible groans but instead turned out to be only my own.

What I'm telling you here is that for decades, I suffered from an extreme Hawke allergy. In recent years, however, I've been forced to reconsider; while he was far from the most important part of Boyhood, his performance in that movie suggested that he'd grown into the actor he was playing at in some of his first films, and as weird as it feels to write this, Moon Knight teased at the type of Newmanesque nuance he'd long aspired to, even if his earlier work rarely reflected it.

All of which is to say that when Hawke bobbed up unexpectedly during an episode of the perfect and much-missed Reservation Dogs, I couldn't be mad about it — and when I learned that Hawke was the lead in Dogs co-creator Sterlin Harjo's new series The Lowdown, I was intrigued. Now, after loving every minute of Reservation Dogs, I'm going to want to watch whatever Harjo does for the rest of his career, but The Lowdown seemed particularly promising — a Tulsa-set noir about a writer/book store owner who gets himself mixed up in a potentially deadly situation because he just can't leave well enough alone.

As Harjo proved with Reservation Dogs, he's a deft hand when it comes to establishing a rich sense of place, which often comes in handy because he's the type of storyteller whose stories tend to feel like they're ambling toward no particular destination. During this era of reduced episode counts but seemingly countless shows, that approach is often a sign of bloat; with Harjo, however, it's a sign that you're in the hands of someone who understands that when you're confident about your destination, the journey is its own reward.

In The Lowdown, that reward manifests itself throughout a story whose Tulsa setting feels so vital and vibrant that it's essentially a character unto itself. Like any good noir, the show gives you its share of characters to keep track of, but it's far from crowded — and yet it's written so three-dimensionally that you could easily see spinoff series for any number of its supporting players. It is, in short, the type of show that's easy to settle into and get lost in, in the best sense of that term.

This is due in large part to Hawke. On paper, Lee Raybon isn't a particularly likable character, and the story doesn't really go out of its way to soften any of his numerous grating edges. Like Newman, Hawke has aged into the part of his career where he's capable of making you love him even when he's playing someone who's sort of rotten, and he brings that fully to bear on his portrayal of Lee. It isn't that he's a villain — he's referred to more than once as "a white man who cares," which isn't really intended as a compliment — but he's certainly self-aggrandizing, frequently thoughtless, and not above justifying collateral damage in his quest for whatever truth he's able to dig up and publish in the pages of the local "long-form magazine" where he writes to supplement the meager income he brings in from the used bookstore he owns. He may or may not be a good dad to his 13-year-old daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who occasionally comes close to sniping the show out from under Hawke), who sees through every ounce of his bullshit, but loves him fiercely anyway.

I think by now you can probably sense the type of show this is, so I won't waste your time by getting into the details of the mystery that nominally powers the plot. It's more important to tell you that in addition to Hawke and Armstrong, you can look forward to seeing a lot of great work from Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Keith David, along with a delightful extended Peter Dinklage cameo and a bittersweet posthumous appearance from Graham Greene. And like Reservation Dogs, The Lowdown has an outstanding soundtrack that includes a number of Tulsa artists, including Ken Pomeroy, who performs her standout original "Bound to Rain" in character:

While watching The Lowdown, I wanted to know where the story would take me, but I wasn't tugging at it to get us wherever it was going; I was more than content to amble toward whatever point on the horizon interested Harjo most. So it came as something of a surprise to me that, in the show's final hour, I found myself genuinely somewhat moved by the way it tied up a lot of its loose ends while positioning Lee, battle-scarred and wiser (but not too much), at a new crossroads that looks a lot like the place where we first found him. If we get a second season, I'll be happy to watch it, but if not, I'll be just as happy to have spent the time I spent with these characters. You should get to know them too.

Elsewhere: For the last year or so, I've been a proud member of the small but dedicated team behind Harmonic, a startup music commerce platform with a vision to pay artists equitably while building a community of passionate fans. I'll get around to writing a more involved pitch at some point; for now, you can learn more at that link right up there.

You can also, if you want to get a bit of a feel for one of the things that's pulled me away from posting here often enough to get semi-professional tortilla chip inhaler Dave Lifton off my goddamn back, visit this here page to read the growing list of interviews I've done for Harmonic in recent months. The latest, with Laura Burhenn, a.k.a. Mynabirds, might be my favorite; we got deep into her relationship with the muse, her feelings regarding pulling her music from Spotify, and more of the touchy-feely stuff I tend to dwell on when I'm talking to artists.

Around the Corner: I'll have a New Music Friday post for you tomorrow. I'm also feeling a Nielsens coming on, and I'm fully aware that it's been some time since we all paid a visit to Bootleg City. As always, I'm grateful for your time and attention.