[This story contains spoilers from the first two episodes of The Lowdown on FX.]
The trailer for The Lowdown shows Ethan Hawke’s character, a crusader and self-described “truthstorian” named Lee Raybon, getting beat up quite a bit. If anything, the preview undersold it.
By the end of the series premiere, Lee has been assaulted in his own home by a pair of skinheads who didn’t like something he wrote about them in a small local paper. By the end of the episode, he’s been beaten worse (by the same guys) and thrown in the trunk of a car, only to witness their murder at the hand of a more polite-seeming but very menacing man, Allen Murphy (Scott Shepherd), who is very likely connected to Lee’s other obsession, the powerful Washberg family.
When the show opens, Lee has written a long piece on the Washbergs’ corrupt history in Tulsa, Oklahoma, very much upsetting Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan), who’s running for governor, and possibly leading to the death by (apparent) suicide of Donald’s brother, Dale (Tim Blake Nelson).
It is, in other words, a ripe setup for a noir story that wears its inspirations — from Chinatown to novelist Jim Thompson the Coen brothers — proudly.
“Jim Thompson is at the center of the show, and The Big Lebowski, and The Long Goodbye was a really big jumping-off point,” series creator Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs) told The Hollywood Reporter. “Lebowski was inspired by a lot of those projects, and we were inspired by all of them. Nick Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie is in there. There are a lot of influences that we weren’t trying to hide. We’re sort of celebrating the history of noir and wearing it on our sleeves.”
Part of what sets The Lowdown apart from those prior works is its setting: Like Reservation Dogs, The Lowdown is set and filmed in Harjo’s home state of Oklahoma. Lee is also investigating a developer who is buying up land in a historically Black neighborhood, which echoes a dark chapter in the city’s history.
“Tulsa was originally founded by my tribe, the Muskogee Creek, and the word ‘Tulsa’ comes from a Muskogee word,” Harjo says. “In the city of Tulsa in the 1920s, a horrific thing happened, which was the race massacre. That was very much [a situation where] people tried to cover that up and not talk about it for a long time. You can’t hide truths like that. And I think that over the last 10 years, that has been talked about and has come to the forefront, which has also helped Tulsa grow its identity and have a more solid foundation as a city. … There’s a dark, dark history there that has never been explored. Just like Chinatown was ripe for noir in L.A. at the time in the time that it was set, I think that right now, there’s so much colliding together — truth and darkness.”
Lee is also not a private detective — he’s a rabble-rouser and something of a mess who owns a struggling rare book shop and is trying very hard to connect with his teenage daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). There is a detective in the story — Keith David’s Marty — but he’s been hired by the Washbergs to keep an eye on Lee, although he also can’t help but bail his subject out of a few jams.
“I love characters like Don Quixote — people who have a grand dream and tremendous amount of blind spots. It’s just ripe for humanity,” Hawke told THR. “We’re all like that in some way. John Steinbeck gets to write a great novel, and we all love him for it — well, he disappeared from his family for five years to write it. He didn’t show up anybody’s soccer games or do anything else but that. … [Lee is] so multi-dimensional. He’s so many things at one time. It makes it funny, and he’s earnest, and he’s a liar and he’s a truth teller — it’s fun.”
Hawke also visibly plays Lee as if he has really felt all the punishment the character has taken. Lee often moves stiffly, as if he’s always in at least a little bit of pain.
“He’s a crusader, he’s an adventurer. He’s like a spiritual warrior of sorts,” Hawke said of Lee (both Marty and an editor played by Michael “Killer Mike” Render tag him as a “white man who cares — saddest of the bunch”). “So he’s going to have battle scars, and there’s so much comedy to be mined from that, and I always tried to incorporate it. I think about like, ‘All right, I guess Lee has probably slept two hours in the last four days.’ I’ve got to try to play that and fill it up with as much realism as we could, and mine it for humor.”
Also adding to the humor of The Lowdown is the title Lee gives himself. Harjo explains that he initially wrote a line in which Lee says he’s “workshopping” the truthstorian label but then just went with it as something he calls himself.
“As I was trying to define what he is in a Lee way, I came upon truthstorian — it just kind of popped in my head,” Harjo said. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous, but it would be really funny if he said that and kind of is working through it and doesn’t know if it sounds great.’ But it is close to what he is. It’s about looking into the past and the present and the future, and [figuring out] what is the truth that connects all of these things.”
