Television

Sterlin Harjo’s superb neo-noir series, The Lowdown, is simultaneously intriguing, tender and hilarious. By Sarah Krasnostein.

The Lowdown transcends its neo-noir influences

Siena East and Ethan Hawke in a scene from The Lowdown.

Credit: FX

“There is only one plot,” the novelist Jim Thompson once said. “Things are not as they seem.” So too for the start of Sterlin Harjo’s neo-noir series The Lowdown. Blink and you’ll miss it, but the opening image is about light – windows pushing gold into the night under a silver stretch of stars. We’re a beat away from high-velocity blood splatter – brutality is intrinsic to this tale – and yet it is ever present, that light.

Citizen journalist and hectic dirtbag Lee Raybon (an outstanding Ethan Hawke) sees himself as “a Tulsa truthstorian”. “I read stuff, I research stuff, I drive around and I find stuff. And then I write about stuff,” he says. “Some people care, some people don’t. I’m chronically unemployed, always broke, but let’s say that I am obsessed with the truth.”

The truths with which Lee is especially obsessed concern history, local politics, blood money and white supremacy. This lends an unlikely nobility to the man and his endeavours, and explains the frequency with which he finds himself punched in the face. It also accounts for a prominent local family’s increasing animus towards him, and the unsettling presence of a man named Marty (Keith David) on his trail.

Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan) is running for state governor. He’s mourning the recent suicide of his brother, Dale (Tim Blake Nelson), but that doesn’t stop him from using the funeral as a gubernatorial photo op or sleeping with Dale’s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn). After Lee finds a note Dale slipped inside a pulp fiction novel shortly before his death, he’s convinced there’s more to this story. “If you’re reading this, I’m probably dead. Behind every great fortune is a great crime…”

Singly and in combination, the eight episodes radiate the huge charisma of a J. J. Cale song – part lazily loping Tulsa sound, part outlaw country. Their visceral power is only amplified by an intellectual understanding of what has gone into their creation.

Explosively compelling and stylistically outstanding, The Lowdown is equal in quality to Harjo’s first television triumph, Reservation Dogs (with Taika Waititi), while being its opposite in form. Where Rez Dogs was formally rangy to the point of cosmic expansiveness, The Lowdown achieves its greatness within the constraints of genre. Both belong to the same universe – characters from the first show make cameos in The Lowdown and both shows were shot on location in Oklahoma.

“At one point, it was called Indian Territory,” Harjo told American public broadcaster WNYC. “A lot of tribes were moved there. My tribes were marched on the Trail of Tears there by force. It has this diversity to it that not a lot of states in the middle of America or down south have … a collision of culture and backgrounds … I wanted to really just tell this story that was representative of the past and the present of Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

As in Rez Dogs, there are no minor characters in The Lowdown. This says as much about their creator’s ethos as it does about his narrative craft. Everyone, no matter how short their moment, is a fully formed world unto themselves. Rachel Crowl shines as steadfast Sally, pouring coffee at Sweet Emily’s late-night diner. Killer Mike brings deft humour as Cyrus, Lee’s editor and friend at the tabloid Tulsa Beat, and Graham Greene delivers a significant final performance, as the late Dale’s unlikely friend.

“No minor characters” is also a hallmark of the Coen brothers. From Lee’s unmistakably Lebowski-esque persona to the handling of edit and dialogue, it’s not possible to watch The Lowdown without being happily reminded of their oeuvre. Harjo wears his artistic heart on his sleeve – if you’re looking for it, you can see the homages to Altman, Lynch and Tarantino too.

The series is also heavily influenced by literature. Episodes are structured into chapters. Lee lives above a cosy used bookshop. No danger is so urgent that he won’t pause to indignantly distinguish the difference between a newspaper and a long-form magazine, or critique bad prose as a teaching moment for his teenage daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). Eudora Welty features, as do Bukowski, Salinger, Marx, Faulkner, Homer and Thompson’s hard-boiled fiction – in first editions, of course.

In their fine painterly aspects, the cinematography and lighting nod to the spaciousness of a Hopper and the archetypes of American regionalism. However, while steeped in influence, The Lowdown transcends it. The show comprises everything and everyone that inspired the sensibility of its creator – at once all of it and ultimately none of it, emerging in the end as itself only. This is a testament to Harjo’s skill as a showrunner and the quality of the writers, actors, directors and producers with whom he collaborates.

The episode starring Peter Dinklage as Wendell, Lee’s former business partner, has few peers in the medium. Written by Olivia Purnell, it’s a masterclass in acting and scriptwriting – that knife edge of what should be said and all that can only be gestured towards. It exemplifies the show’s overarching ability to balance light and shade, sacrificing neither while keeping its complex narrative airborne.

A signature of his work to date is that Harjo – now an auteur in his own right – is equally interested in the interior pockets of character, the interpersonal networks of community and the possibilities of placedness. Place consistently figures in ways that bring to mind the words of the American writer Wendell Berry: “Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect.” Or as Dale, in one of his posthumous appearances, puts it by quoting his beloved Jim Thompson: “A weed is a plant out of place.”

Harjo has a rare ability to seamlessly unify tonal extremes – violence and vulnerability, humour and grief. The result here is an exceptionally rare show that manages the narrative feat of being both low concept – that is, driven by the subtleties of character and relationship – and high concept – neatly reducible to the attention-grabbing hooks of genre. The effect is a richly populated story space, everything tightly packed together in hour-long episodes that roil with the bright density of a neutron star.

If you look, stars figure throughout. There’s Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars on the shelf of the new bookstore where Lee meets his long-suffering ex, Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn), the star necklace worn by their daughter, the “stars and bars” in Lee’s “ironic” Confederate flag tattoo and the glittering constellations in the great Oklahoma sky. This gestures towards placedness – the star on the Osage shield of Tulsa’s flag. But it’s also a leitmotif of Harjo’s work in which darkness – human violence in general and the American caste system’s catastrophic constriction of Native and Black lives specifically – does not overpower the light.

Lee’s character was inspired by Lee Roy Chapman, a writer and activist who wrote about the city’s crimes and their concealment. They include the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 – a white supremacist terror attack that decimated the prosperous neighbourhood known as Black Wall Street – and the involvement in it of a city founder and member of the Ku Klux Klan, W. Tate Brady.

“There is no healing without truth,” Harjo told WNYC. “You have to hold a mirror up to yourself so you can see your flaws, and you have to also celebrate what’s good as well, and that’s something that in my work – whether it’s Reservation Dogs or The Lowdown – I’m a believer in looking at things from both the light and the dark side and trying to learn from them and heal from them. I think looking at something more holistically like that is just truer to life.”

Whether we call it American gothic, southern noir, country noir or neo-noir, The Lowdown doesn’t just tell a rollicking story that is simultaneously intriguing, tender, serious, hilarious and quirky (paddlefish caviar, anyone?). It deploys old genre tropes – the cynical anti-hero, the femme fatale, the pervasive sense of doomed corruption – to cast new light and shadow on the American dream.

Having now made two of the millennium’s best television shows, the pressure on Harjo’s next work is enormous. Whether it’s another season of this show or something entirely different, there is every reason to believe he will both confound and exceed expectations.

ARTS DIARY

MUSICAL Congratulations, Get Rich! (恭喜发财, 人日快乐)

Wharf 1 Theatre, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until December 14

THEATRE One Night Only

Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre, Naarm/Melbourne, November 26-30

TEXTILES Stories You Wear: Magpie Goose

Museum of Brisbane, Meanjin, from November 22

MULTIMEDIA Muntrikawripa – Takayna

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DANCE The Nutcracker

Her Majesty’s Theatre, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, November 26-28

LAST CHANCE

EXHIBITION Maree Clarke: Seeing the Invisible

Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, Ngambri, until November 23

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 19, 2025 as "Stars in the darkness".

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