Sterlin Harjo’s first series, “Reservation Dogs,” does a lot of playing around with genre. It opens with an elevated (gas station) heist (for flamin’ flamers chips), after all. There are ghosts and spirits, horror episodes, trips back into the ‘70s, the odd touch of a Western. In his second show, FX’s “The Lowdown,” Harjo and his team are still delightfully elastic when it comes to moving from comedy to thriller to character drama and back again — sometimes within the same scene.
But “The Lowdown” unambiguously owes much more to film noir than any other genre. You need look no further than the fact that, like all great noir protagonists, Ethan Hawke’s Lee Raybon keeps getting the shit beat out of him.
Raybon is the owner of a Tulsa secondhand book store by day, self-appointed “truthstorian” by night, who investigates the hypocrisies and hidden secrets of Oklahoma’s elite and exposes them in local media. That means a lot of driving around in his beat-up van and sticking his nose in the business of people who would really just like to do their Late Stage Capitalism in private. The pilot episode kicks off with a closeted member of the Washberg family, Dale (Tim Blake Nelson), appearing to commit suicide after Lee’s latest exposé (excuse me, long-form magazine article). It ends with a couple of skinheads kidnapping Lee and stuffing him in the back of their sedan.
“You gotta get beat up, and Ethan’s really good at it,” Harjo told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “He’s somehow managed to balance having this superstar career, basically, with also an independent career and perspective as well. He’s never really lost himself, you know? It doesn’t feel like you can’t reach out and touch Ethan Hawke, and that’s what you need in a noir. You know? They have to represent us.”
There’s a specific flavor of everyman representation that asserts itself in a noir story. The characters are up against it. There’s something rotten in the state of the world, and the environment is a bewildering maze of violence and corruption — the “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” effect, if you will. But damn it, a noir hero still cares. In a deeply sardonic and gallows-humor way, a lot of the time, sure, but they care. Hawke’s not-so-silver-tongued independent journalist fits squarely into that tradition, and into Harjo’s interests as a storyteller.
“A great noir protagonist is sort of a good underdog,” Harjo told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “The world is against him, and I love that. The story’s kind of about discovering who they are when faced with insurmountable danger and pressure, and there’s something about that that I like. It’s just such a dramatic way to place a character, and the stakes are high, but it also just feels driven by truth and grit and reality.”
“The Lowdown” earns grit points simply by having Lee be someone who, when he gets another shiner, is still recovering from his first. Episode 2, “The Devil’s Mama”, which aired alongside the pilot, opens with Lee trying to cover the blood and bruises left by the skinheads via a $1,000 bribe and a YouTube makeup tutorial. As opposed to a genius or gentleman detective, the more mundane and everyday the struggle Harjo and his writers could put Lee through, the better.
“[Noir protagonists] are very human, but we also have to believe that, given the opportunity, that we could go into the fire as well. And I think there’s something about it that just touches the human experience,” Harjo said. “It’s like, why do zombie movies work? There’s something about it, some fear there that it represents for all of us.”
Not so unlike a horde of zombies, once a noir character uncovers a conspiracy and stumbles upon danger, it just keeps spreading, infecting everything they touch. “One character opens something up and then the noir, the world, sort of spreads, right? That’s essentially what happens to Lee in the show, I think,” Harjo said.
If any burgeoning FX truthstorians are looking for noir keys to the Washberg mystery Lee is chasing within “The Lowdown,” alas, there aren’t any smoking guns or Maltese Falcons. However, one noir that Harjo was inspired by was the 1949 Robert Wise boxing noir, “The Set-Up.” In it, Robert Ryan plays an aging fighter who is asked to take a dive against an up-and-comer backed by the mob.
“I showed ‘The Set-Up’ to the writers before we started writing the show, because the character [in the film] basically can’t get out of his own way,” Harjo said. “Boxing is his life, and it’s who he is. He’s got this girlfriend that he could run off and get married and whatever, but he just won’t. The whole time, you’re like, ‘What are you doing?!’”
“What are you doing?!” is a question that can be continually asked of Lee throughout “The Lowdown,” too. The answer is, ultimately, being true to himself. The shit-kickings and the setbacks (and set-ups) are the heightened, heroic proof of that. In using the language of film noir, Harjo and Hawke get to do a kind of character work that other kinds of stories simply don’t allow.
“I found that I just loved the parameters of genre, how much you could say within those parameters, you know? You can actually say more than just having the characters talk about how they feel,” he added.
The first two episodes of “The Lowdown” are available to stream on Hulu.
