"The Lowdown" Is a Noir for Our Era

"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."

"From the start, it's evident that Lee's single-minded pursuit of the truth comes at a personal cost. His wife has left him, and his relationship with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), is correspondingly shaky. His income, such as it is, is cobbled together from bookselling, freelance reporting, and flipping the odd work of art. He routinely gets beaten or abducted by subjects who resent his coverage."

Ethan Hawke has reinvented himself in middle age as a character actor known for portraying heedless heroes whose certainty about their righteousness propels them to extremes. He played a radicalized clergyman in Paul Schrader's 2017 film First Reformed and portrayed militant abolitionist John Brown in the 2020 adaptation of James McBride's The Good Lord Bird. In FX's The Lowdown he plays Lee Raybon, an indefatigable Tulsa journalist whose single-minded pursuit of truth costs him his marriage and strains his relationship with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Francis. Lee supplements his income through bookselling and freelance reporting and routinely faces violence from resentful subjects, inspiring bemusement rather than admiration.

Read at The New Yorker