“The Lowdown” Is a Noir for Our Era

Some actors you can watch doing the same thing over and over again. Cary Grant built a career on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made an art form of falling apart with tragic intensity. 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. Hawke then delivered one of the best TV performances of the past decade as the militant abolitionist John Brown in the 2020 adaptation of