Ethan Hawke‘s performance in Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed is one of his all-timers. In part, I feel, because he really knows how to channel “tormented”. (I still think Hawke’s anguished-younger-brother performance in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is his all-time peak.) Somewhere over Kansas last night it hit me that the Hawke of, say, 12 or 14 years ago would been a supremely right Yeshua of Nazareth in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. If, obviously, Martin Scorsese hadn’t made his classic 31 years ago and had waited until the early to mid aughts. As moving as Willem Dafoe was, Hawke might have been a notch or two more affecting.
