Blue Moon★★★1/2
- 2filmcritics
- 8 minutes ago
- 4 min read
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A Not-So-Funny Valentine
Ethan Hawke is nothing short of amazing as the witty, spirited, egotistical, and lovelorn lyricist Lorenz Hart, half of the famed 20th-century musical comedy team of Rodgers and Hart. A favorite of director Richard Linklater, Hawke puts on almost a one-man show, accompanied by a delightful cadre of “extras” who amplify the protagonist’s strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.
Lorenz "Larry" Hart (an amazing Ethan Hawke), with his trademark cigar,
holds forth at the bar at Sardi's, in almost a one-man show.
To be fair to his music-composing partner, Richard Rodgers, Andrew Scott plays the musician half of the team as more than an extra. Rodgers is the straight man to Hart’s kinetic, satiric energy. As the character Hart tells it, Rodgers is an opera lover, a family man married with children, in bed by 9. He, Hart, is a party-going, heavy-drinking, bi-sexual bachelor, still carousing at 5 a.m.
It's the opening night of “Oklahoma!” (“with an exclamation point!,” Hart sneers).
The always creative Linklater sets his film over an evening in one location: the bar at Sardi’s, March 31, 1943. The famed New York City restaurant is closed to the public because it will soon be the scene of the after-party for the opening night of “Oklahoma!” (“with an exclamation point!,” Hart sneers), Rodgers’ first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II, who is replacing Hart as Rodgers’ lyricist of choice. Critiqued by Hart with great aplomb—“an elephant in a corn field?”— “Oklahoma!” will become a smash hit, running for more than 2,000 performances, and will revolutionize musical theater with its combination of story, music, and lyrics.
He is a man adrift, radically alone despite those around him, talking to himself; “I’m the most interesting person I know.”
Over the course of an hour or two in the almost-empty bar, Hawke roams and rages, lauds and critiques, on the cusp of overpowering the movie audience in his dominance on camera. Hart engages the few inhabitants—bartender Eddie (classic New Yorker Bobby Cannavale), a quiet guy writing in the corner who we learn is E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), and the Jewish pianist Morty (Jonah Lees). But mostly he is a man adrift, radically alone despite those around him, talking to himself; “I’m the most interesting person I know.”
Hart (Hawke) has been eagerly awaiting 20-year-old Yale student Elizabeth Wieland (Margaret Qualley), with whom the 47-year-old Hart is irrationally smitten.
Enter another character, one Hart has been eagerly awaiting, the only other person who has a major presence on screen: 20-year-old Yale student Elizabeth Wieland, with whom the 47-year-old Hart is irrationally smitten. It’s the aspiring poet and set-designer’s letters to Hart that form the basis for Robert Kaplow’s script. Margaret Qualley is at her best as the gorgeous, blonde, statuesque Elizabeth confiding sexual fantasies to the not-so-handsome, balding, 5’-tall Hart in the close confines of Sardi’s coatroom.
Genre-categorizing would tell you this is a biopic. If so, it’s of someone unfamiliar to us: Hart’s not Elvis or Margaret Thatcher or Bob Dylan. And it’s not a standard biopic. There are no flashbacks to explain what is going on in Hart’s life and head. The secondary characters and Hawke’s obsessive talking in what seems like a one-take play (here is a film that will be made into a play, rather than the other way around) give the audience a deep understanding of, and empathy for, the person behind the show-off.
E.B. White (“Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web”) is on hand to add to and to confirm Hart’s brilliance as a writer and lyricist.
White (an Easter egg for those who recall the author of children’s books “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web”), considered one of the best wordsmiths of his era, is on hand to add to and to confirm Hart’s brilliance as a writer and lyricist. The New Yorker writer is a sounding board in Hart’s “life play” about himself, a monologue that requires active listening, by the audience as well as by the “extras.”
It's the celebratory after-party on the opening night of "Oklahoma!"--the musical for which Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney, back left) replaced Hart (Hawke, front left) as Richard Rodgers' (Andrew Scott, right) lyricist of choice.
Rodgers—a cold, perhaps too cold Scott—while acknowledging Hart’s prior work, their decades of hits together, and the older (by 7 years) man’s comic sense—tells Hart he can no longer tolerate his drunken stupors and unpredictable work habits, that he needs a psychiatrist and a doctor, maybe even to be institutionalized. Hart is craven in begging Rodgers for another chance.
Seven months later, Hart will die, drunk and alone on the streets of New York. (No spoiler—that’s the opening scene.) What Kaplow and Linklater, along with Hawke and Qualley, have captured is a man in free fall—in an admittedly brilliant, entertaining, charismatic free fall—reeling from loneliness, a damaged ego, unrequited love, and loss of his primary creative outlet and joy: the 25-year collaboration with Richard Rodgers. A tragedy, in one act.
She says: The script has a nifty origin story: Kaplow, a high school teacher and novelist who was the writer for Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles” (2008) bought carbon copies of the letters from a Nyack bookseller.
He says: A deep dive into a troubled man’s soul. “You saw me standing alone” (“Blue Moon,” 1934).
Date: 2025)
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, Patrick Kennedy, Bobby Cannavale, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 100 minutes
Other Awards: 5 wins and 17 nominations