Truth and Consequences Out of Tulsa Return To Torment Ethan Hawke in ‘The Lowdown’

Late on in Season Two of the acclaimed FX TV series “The Lowdown,” dazzling actress Betty Gilpin engages star Ethan Hawke in a drinking game that’s a bit like “truth-or-dare,” except you just need to say something “true.”Turns out “Truth” is kind of a big deal in the “Lowdown” universe. This dramedy-mystery — set in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s more eccentric corners — revolves around Lee Raybon (Mr. Hawke), a journalist/used-book-store owner who, in the show’s first episode, declared himself a “truth-storian.”That’s when we also learned that Raybon has ruffled local feathers by publishing an expose — in an actual ink-and-paper alt-weekly — about racist skinheads, and their ties to a local political dynasty. “The truth doesn’t care if you’re comfortable,” Raybon said back in Season One. “It doesn’t even care if you’re alive. It just wants to be told.” Raybon is back again — six of eight new Lowdown episodes were made available to reviewers — now calling himself a “dismantler.”But when asked to preach some “truth” by a public defender named Ginger (that’s Gilpin), what does Raybon say? “I like to sniff my boots.” To which she gigglingly counters: “I don’t love the Beatles.” It’s an offbeat, will-they-or-won’t-they moment that captures some of what works best in “The Lowdown.” It also makes you realize that your enjoyment of this series — created by “Reservation Dogs” showrunner Sterlin Harjo — depends on how much tolerance you have for Mr. Hawke’s ink-stained hipster-beatnik-radical schtick, and his contempt for all things “normie,” including his own daughter’s plea that he ease up on the booze and drugs. We get heavy doses of all this early in the new season, when Raybon meets Ginger, who is being followed by a suspicious fellow with a Nazi tattoo on his neck.You don’t need an investigative journalist, in other words, to figure out who the bad guys are in “The Lowdown.” They work as guards at the local prison, in case things are not clear enough. “If this thing goes all the way to the top,” Raybon’s editor later asks, “who’s pulling the strings?” The degree to which we should take such “X-Files”-esque lines unironically hovers over both seasons of The Lowdown. To Mr. Harjo’s credit, the show is packed with a whole lot more than important but not-exactly-groundbreaking history lessons about the sins of Tulsa’s — and America’s — past.Once again, The Lowdown’s guest stars are top-notch. Alongside Ms. Gilpin, there is Tommy Lee Jones as Raybon’s long lost father, looking like a battered Rembrandt portrait, as he he pokes holes in his son’s defensive front, all the while asking (without actually asking) if the two of them can reconcile given their stormy past.No wonder Mr. Jones spends much of the show wearing a bright red “Psalms 107:29” hat. (“He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.”)Cody Lighting and Siena East are also back, providing muscle and wisecracks, as part of a Greek (well, Native American) chorus pointing Raybon to some of Tulsa’s darker, dustier corners, at least when they’re not rolling their eyes at some of his wilder flights of conspiratorial fantasy.The soundtrack to Lowdown is also superlative, with each episode — and sometimes each scene — atmospherically set and brilliantly paced to the longing twang of Slim Rhodes, the placid strum of Travis Linville, or (most surprising of all) the barbaric strip-club yawp of “Cat Scratch Fever” by (known conservative!) Ted Nugent.Rounding out the returnees for Season Two is the stalwart Keith David (as Raybon’s beset-upon editor) as well as Run the Jewels rapper Killer Mike, a fist-in-the-air radical who also manages to be pain-in-the-gut funny.At its best, “The Lowdown” is an homage to 1970s anti-establishment cinema — “All the President’s Men” meets “The Long Goodbye” — with its battered investigative hero taking on powerful forces.Mr. Harjo’s Tulsa even seems a lot like Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” and there are moments when “The Lowdown” seems ready to expose perhaps its most uncomfortable truth — that its Jake Gittes, its exposer of oppressive systems is, himself, the whitest of white guys, who might possibly have wandered away from the set of “Portlandia.”It’s probably a good thing that “The Lowdown” doesn’t interrogate itself so thoroughly, opting instead for substantive plot digressions — the Raybon father-son conflicts, the Lee-Ginger romance — that are as interesting as the terrible crimes and punishments at its dark heart.“Oklahoma! Dostoyevsky!” is the story Raybon says he plans to tell early in Season Two. He knows this truth is out there. Once he starts looking into the details, he might even be able to prove it.

Truth and Consequences Out of Tulsa Return To Torment Ethan Hawke in ‘The Lowdown’

Truth and Consequences Out of Tulsa Return To Torment Ethan Hawke in ‘The Lowdown’

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