Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s scrappy, discursive gab-fests as it does a conventional biopic. Almost entirely confined to a tavern location, presented mostly in real-time and starring the director’s longtime leading man Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon is ostensibly about chronicling a night of small yet crushing disappointments near the end of Hart’s life in 1943. However, the loose dramatic framework (the film is short on actual incident) and the small captive audience of denizens hovering around the bar is an ideal venue for Hart to hold court and uncork a series of erudite yet tart monologues on the nature of art, romance, sexuality and disappointment. Written by Robert Kaplow (author of Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, which shares a similar theatrical milieu with this film), Blue Moon is rich in wordplay, period minutiae, and easter eggs that will no doubt tickle enthusiasts of mid-century pop culture. But where it parts ways with Linklater’s earlier, better films is that for all the words spoken aloud in Blue Moon, the film isn’t especially interested in a dialogue. The viewer is as captive to Hawke’s overwritten but convincingly stream-of-conscious musings as the gathered bar staff and upscale drunks. The film positions itself as a journey of self-discovery, but there’s scarcely any room for exploration or uncovering of ideas that don’t dovetail with its themes or the self-pitying disposition of its subject.
The setting of our tale is Sardis, the iconic New York City watering hole, on the occasion of opening night of Oklahoma! on Broadway. The musical, which through the prism of hindsight is proclaimed by all the film’s characters as an epoch-defining sensation that will “be performed by high schools for decades,” was of course written by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. But before that was a thing, the Great White Way was ruled by Rodgers and Hart. The film picks up in the aftermath of Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), having tired of Lorenz’s (Hawke) unreliable work ethic — his heavy drinking, his sourness, his lack of focus and unwillingness to observe office hours — having taken on a new creative partnership that history tells us will consign his one-time librettist to an afterthought. Lorenz, having already caught Oklahoma! in previews, leaves the performance early to beat the cast and crew to the bar, which the film treats a little like crashing your ex’s engagement party. Lorenz isn’t just waiting to disingenuously congratulate his former writing partner; he is also anticipating the arrival of his much younger protégé Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he claims to be madly in love with and with whom he hopes to consummate the relationship later that very evening. But this is a little confusing to both the audience and Sardis’ sympathetic barkeep Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), as Lorenz is quite obviously a closeted homosexual — he even repeatedly flirts with the flower delivery boy who brings the bouquet that Hart ordered for Elizabeth.
It’s less a question of sexual fluidity — as Hart himself bawdily, somewhat nonsensically, quips: “a bisexual can jerk off equally well with either hand” — than self-delusion. In his late 40’s, balding, and diminutive in stature (the film uses a combination of smart blocking, casting tall actors opposite him and contorting his body awkwardly to give the impression that Hawke is all of five feet tall), not to mention being a barely functioning alcoholic who still lives with his mother, Lorenz is nobody’s idea of a lothario. And Elizabeth has clearly taken the measure of her mentor’s prospects as a physical lover, humoring him as one would a favorite uncle (Hart’s lechery never comes across as anything other than academic). Lorenz’s incessant fawning over Elizabeth and excessive praise of her arguable talents as a theater student are in stark contrast with the utter contempt with which he holds seemingly everyone and everything else. In advance of Rodgers’ arrival at Sardis, Hart pooh-poohs Oklahoma! as simplistic, populist dreck (demonstrating particular disdain for its inclusion of an exclamation mark in its title), dismisses much of his own body of work — including the film’s title song, which Lorenz bristles over everyone in the bar knowing the lyrics to — and seemingly has a bitchy rejoinder at the ready for anyone who offends his sensibilities as a lovesick malcontent. But he saves most of his disdain for what he would describe as overly sincere art that would serve to comfort rather than challenge audiences. As Hart himself muses, “who wants inoffensive art?”
That’s a statement of purpose the film has no real desire to interrogate nor upend. The audience for something as insular and outwardly snooty as Blue Moon is undeniably limited; however, within that narrow spectrum, the film is as much nostalgia-fueled comfort food as something like Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night was. The film is quite literally “playing the hits” for a certain segment of theater enthusiasts (the in-house piano player frequently regales the attendees with performances of staples from the Rodgers and Hart songbook like “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and “Isn’t It Romantic?”), and its catty witticism and withering burns of popular literary figures and dramatists have been designed to elicit knowing chortles from the intelligentsia. As are its parade of “if you know, you know” celebrity cameos who parade through Sardis, and Blue Moon can’t resist the compulsion to elbow the viewer in the ribs lest they miss how clever the filmmakers are. When Hart notices the quiet gentleman sitting in the corner is none other than the novelist E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), it’s not enough for the men to engage as peers in respectful conversation about heartbreak and legacy. No, instead White has to volunteer that he’s struggling with the new children’s book he’s been obligated to author about a precocious mouse (Lorenz naturally suggests he name the character “Stuart,” which White enthusiastically scribbles down). When Hart is introduced to the aspiring director George Roy Hill, he advises that stories of friendship are so much more rewarding than romances (small blessings that Lorenz doesn’t then add “and it’d be great if one of the buddies doesn’t know how to swim but also doesn’t mention it until he has to jump from a tall cliff”). And between this and Maestro, filmmakers really need to retire the “young Stevie Sondheim” gag.
What Blue Moon has going for it is Hawke, who’s front and center in nearly every frame, giving a performance that’s equal parts tortured and effervescent. We know from the film’s prologue (and, again, history) that Hart will have drunk himself to death in only a few months, and that weighs over moments like Lorenz cajoling Eddie into keep pouring him whiskey. Hawke gets to deliver many a flourishy speech on, say, the conflict between sincerity and satire — a major bone of contention between Hart and Rodgers, with the latter innocently failing to see the harm in creating something that makes people laugh and cry — but it’s clear how much he’s wielding cynicism as a shield in both his professional and personal life. Hart is a hopeless romantic (emphasis on hopeless) prone to quoting Bogart’s line from Casablanca: “no one ever loved me that much.” For as loquacious as Hart is, he’s helpless to silently listen (in enthrallment even) when in the presence of Qualley’s Elizabeth, hanging on her every word and nonverbally registering that he never really stood a chance with her. For all its prickly dishiness, Blue Moon is ultimately a rather heart-on-its-sleeve affair, and Hawke exemplifies that wounded heart. The character is desperate for acceptance from beautiful people like Rodgers or Elizabeth, yet is destined to be rejected (to the point of inviting it).
But whereas Linklater has made an entire career dramatizing characters shooting the shit in a way that gradually reveals themselves, Blue Moon is a different animal. Kaplow’s screenplay, superficially high-brow though it may be, announces its intentions at every turn, robbing the film of spontaneity or discovery. Its ornate, flowery dialogue — every spoken line feels hand-polished and preserved under museum glass — renders the film hermetic to the point of being airless, and all this with the film working backwards from the its bittersweet final scene (which functions as both a callback to Hart’s commentary on his own work as well as another homage to Casablanca) and revealing that Lorenz’s disdain for sincerity to be rather toothless. Surprise: the man who wrote some of the most enduring love songs of all-time is a giant squish, who channeled a lifetime of heartbreak into his work. Blue Moon is pleasant but familiar, like an old sweater or dog-eared book. It’s urbane, warm, and a little classy. But it’s also, most damningly, inoffensive through and through.
DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater; CAST: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, Bobby Cannavale; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: October 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
Comments are closed.