Review: Ethan Hawke Is a Dirtbag Delight in ‘The Lowdown’

Ethan Hawke’s face, an angular, beautiful cinematic presence since Dead Poets Society , gets put through the wringer on The Lowdown . In the closing minutes of the pilot, we see him behind the wheel, bloodied and gashed, left eye swollen shut, teeth smeared with red. The image grips you, but its gnarliness is undercut by absurdity: He’s laughing maniacally, having cheated death through no effort of his own. Creator Sterlin Harjo’s follow-up to his pantheon-great Reservation Dogs for FX, debuting this week, riffs on mid-century noirs and hard-boiled detective fiction, in which snooping protagonists are routinely roughed up, shaken down, and driven to the brink of madness. So it goes in The Lowdown , but Harjo filters the genre through his distinct sensibility, equal parts comic, h