“The Lowdown” puts a gritty spin on noir

“The Lowdown” introduces its scraggly detective Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) by way of a visit to a private club where Tulsa, Oklahoma’s rich and powerful plan their conquests. Against this enclave’s polished stone walls and bannisters, Lee looks every ragged inch of the tawdry menace the politicians and businessmen he squares off against expect him to be.

But Lee’s also a schemer whose griminess is his superpower. His adversaries think he’ll crumple like yesterday’s broadsheet when they turn him away, and are perturbed to realize he’s more like the human equivalent of tissue hanging onto the heel of a shoe. Getting rid of him will require a good deal of scraping.

In “Reservation Dogs,” Sterlin Harjo celebrated his boundless adoration of cinema by fusing comedy with iconic tributes to ‘80s coming-of-age movies. For his second series outing, he merges his fondness for ‘70s-style neo-noir with his enduring love for his home state, tapping Hawke’s prose-addicted gumshoe to mosey us through its beauty and corruption.

“The Lowdown” travels through the streets and byways of Oklahoma prairie country in a way that celebrates its homey beauty, with scenes bathed in the golden light typically associated with L.A. noir. Here, it’s employed to accentuate the small-town sunniness of the place along with its buzz and sweat, emphasizing Lee’s quixotic trust in the inevitability of truth.

As detective types go, Lee is closer in appearance to The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” than Philip Marlowe, the main difference being that he has a job as a rare books purveyor. Sadly, he only sells enough tomes to keep gas in his beat-up van and pursue his calling as Tulsa’s resident “truthstorian,” a blend of journalist and conspiracist. Lee holds no illusions as to whether his calling will gain him any notoriety or accolades. “Some people care, some people don’t,” he says. “I’m chronically unemployed, always broke, but let’s just say that I am obsessed with the truth.”

Lee’s current preoccupation involves a wealthy local family, the Washbergs, whom he suspects of wrongdoing. When his incisive profile in a local periodical precedes the suspicious death of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the younger brother of gubernatorial candidate Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), Lee makes it his mission to expose whatever Donald is hiding.

The problem is, Dale’s demise is officially deemed a suicide. (We see Dale write a curious note before he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head, but we don’t see how he was shot.) Lee, being Lee, believes otherwise, spurred on by his discovery of pages of purple prose that Dale hid inside his Jim Thompson crime pulps.

While I wouldn’t drop the Tarantino-esque cliché of calling “The Lowdown” a TV show about movies to ratify its merits, I will say that fans of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” and other heavy hitters from that era will glean a special satisfaction in watching it.

Then again, you certainly don’t have to be a deeply invested cinephile to fall hard for this yarn, because the performances and visuals are captivating in themselves. Harjo excels at capturing a place’s feeling and mood, and this version of Tulsa is as inviting as it is dangerous. Lee surrounds himself with a network of well-meaning people who take care of each other, interspersed with assorted ne’er-do-wells. Only a few pose a real threat.

Hawke’s rangy crusader happens to be a magnet for that type of trouble. Within the first hour, he’s slapped around a few times, tossed into a trunk and nearly murdered. He recovers from that brush with death by slapping bandages on his face and sunglasses over his black eye to downplay the damage, a la Jack Nicholson’s Jake in “Chinatown.”

Lee can be a smooth talker and an adept liar, except in situations where only the truth will suffice. Often, he lives up to the admonishment slapped on him by his fellow antique enthusiast and frenemy, Ray (Michael Hitchcock), who calls Lee a “dirty, dirty man.” That’s a backhanded compliment, though. Fact digging can be a filthy business, and Lee knows the clean-cut Donald Washberg is hiding a whole lot of mud behind his man-of-the-people grin.

MacLachlan plays his villain to the hilt, as one would expect, especially in the scenes he shares with Jeanne Tripplehorn, who portrays Dale’s frequently soused widow, Betty Jo. As is the case in these mysteries, the upstanding citizens are propped up by a whole lot of lowlifes, but few as fearsome as Scott Shepherd’s chilly construction manager, Allen Murphy.

Next to Lee’s cracked beams of sunshine, Shepherd’s builder is disturbingly blank, though not impossible to read. Anyone can see that he means to do harm, but it’s the why, how and when that gives onlookers the shivers. Occupying the grey space between the enforcer and whatever Donald is up to is Tracy Letts’ Frank Martin, a local construction magnate buying up Black businesses at a clip that has tripped Lee’s internal alarm.

Everything circles back to our truthstorian’s amiability and natural charm that even those who know better find impossible to resist. Donald’s private investigator, Marty (Keith David), can’t bring himself to intimidate the guy into ditching his hunt. Cyrus Arnold (Michael Render, aka Killer Mike), the publisher of a local newspaper, supports Lee’s mission even though Cyrus knows he’ll bring him trouble.

More emotionally striking are his relationships with his daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and his ex, Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn). They reflect Lee to the audience as a man who means well but can’t be counted on to deliver the basic stability a family requires. Yet it’s also obvious that they believe in Lee’s goodness. Francis even suspects her dad may be some kind of hero.

Hawke has spent his career carefully choosing which auteurs he works with. Partnering with Harjo after a sensational guest appearance in “Reservation Dogs” allows him to come home in other ways, channeling the oddball electricity that he lent to “The Good Lord Bird” into a less blustery and more poignant role. “The Lowdown” tames Lee’s mania for his cause through the barely obscured current of hangdog defeat weakly powering his personal life. It spikes whenever he’s in Sam’s presence, and drives him up the wall when another figure from his past resurfaces to remind him of his failures.

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On the other side of that seesaw expectantly sits his daughter’s faith in him. Some of the best scenes in the five episodes of “The Lowdown” made available for preview feature father and daughter working as a scrappy team, with Lee slowly winning her trust and partnership.

He’s a skilled seducer, talking his way out of near-death situations with his gift for gab and ear for great writing, or into the bed of a woman who is up front about using him. But what Lee creates with Francis, and Hawke with his co-star, Armstrong, is playful and lovely.

Hawke doesn’t overload their delicate dances or any of his other scene partnerships with an insistence on pulling the spotlight, true to his character’s unspoken self-regard as a guide who happens to investigate his curiosities. It’s that balance of charisma and humility that makes me eager to see how “The Lowdown” resolves, and keep my fingers crossed that these eight episodes are merely the first of many cases for his public investigator to crack like the spine of a well-loved book.

“The Lowdown” debuts at 9 p.m. Tuesday, September 23  on FX. Episodes release weekly and stream on Hulu the next day.