After they're evicted without warning, hard-working widower Samuel Murphy (Hawke) and his young daughter, Penny (Avy Berry), are accosted by cops while trying to find a new place. Penny is taken away, and Murphy winds up at a prisoner work camp led by the baseball-loving, vaguely sadistic warden Clancy (Russell Crowe). Murphy, a gifted mechanic and a veteran of the Great War, immediately stands out to Clancy as a tough-minded, industrious guy.
Hawke was only 13 when he made his first film, Explorers. He became a star at 18 with Dead Poets Society. More than 30 years later, he's still acting, except now when he gets a script he forgets he's no longer a young guy. "I'll be sent a script and it says, 'Billy, age 19, skateboarding down the street,' and I think, 'Oh that's my part,'" Hawke says. "It takes me a while to realize, 'Oh, Billy's father, age 55, gruff and weathered around the edges. ... Oh, that's me."
But it's Ethan Hawke, who plays a writer and bookstore owner named Lee Raybon, who's the real treat of the show. Lee, so beyond category in the world of media that he calls himself a "truthstorian," is equal parts good intention and questionable judgment. He boasts a dogged commitment to the truth but often makes the wrong choices, finds himself in bad situations, and has to bluff his way out-not always successfully.
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.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
