Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo’s excellent crime caper has the actor on top form as a journalist taking down Tulsa’s bad guys
E
than 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’s car.
A freelance journalist by trade (among other things), Lee is the self-appointed gumshoe in creator Sterlin Harjo’s deliciously pulpy and deceptively lighthearted noir caper. He sniffs around Tulsa, Oklahoma, digs through people’s 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.
Hawke is teaming with Harjo again in the eight-part series (of which critics received five episodes), after appearing in the latter’s Peabody-winning Reservation Dogs. He’s predictably terrific in the role, playing Lee as a rascal who we simultaneously root for and are embarrassed by. He’s a self-righteous narcissist who calls himself Tulsa’s “truthstorian”. He’s always the first to toot his own horn whenever he accomplishes something (anything), even if there’s no one around for him to share the satisfaction with. His mission to clean house around Tulsa – taking on white supremacists, crooked real estate developers and local politicians, who may all be in bed with each other – is perhaps Lee’s way to distract from how much of a disaster he’s created in his own home.
