“Blue Moon,” conceived and released as an awards contender in late 2025, is a tuneful but talk-you-to-death take on a pivotal night late in the life of legendary song lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Richard Linklater’s film clings to its “Unhappy Lives of Great Artist” formula to a fault, capturing a diminutive, unhappy and alcoholic “star” in steep decline, but keeping up an empty, brave front for his vastly diminished “public.
It’s built on a colorful turn by Ethan Hawke in the title role — puffing cigars, trying to avoid “falling off the wagon” and bending the ears of anybody within earshot at New York’s famed Sardi’s restaurant and club on the opening night of a show Hart whose lyrics Hart didn’t write.
It’s March, 1943. The show was “Oklahoma!” with, Hart mocks, “an EXCLAMATION point!” And it would change Broadway and the American musical theatre.
“The corn is as HIGH as an ELEPHANT’s eye’ is the stupidest lyric in the American Songbook!”
The premise of this sturdy but sometimes sultifying long, dark night of the soul melodrama is that Hart’s demons and predilections got the better of him, and no string of Broadway (“Pal Joey,” “Babes in Arms” and Hit Parade hits (“Blue Moon,” “My Funny Valentine”) could fill the holes in his heart.
Very short, gay and closeted, a “voyeur” by reputation, something confirmed by screenwriter Robert Kaplow’s reading of the letters Hart exchanged with a late life vicarious crush, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), Hart wrote tunes that often ached in perfectly composed couplets with external and internal rhymes.
“Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone…”
“Worst goddamn lyric I ever wrote,” Hart blusters to the soldier-on-leave (Jonah Lees) playing piano in a nearly empty Sardi’s. The man had a lot of hits, and high standards.
That’s a little harsh. But Hart’s just walked out on opening night for the musical that had to mean the end of his long association with composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). And he knows it.
There’s no La La Land escape hatch for Hart.
“Do they even speak ENGLISH out there in Hollywood?” But he quotes the new hit “Casablanca” adoringly. “
“Nobody ever loved me that much.”
And the bottle? Well, our friendly and indulgent barkeep (Bobby Cannavale) can leave it, having filled one glass for Hart to admire and comment on, next to his “shot” of seltzer water. He can’t drink, as that’s one reason he’s not sharing fresh glories of Rodgers.
As he awaits the Broadway crowd, including the creators of “Oklahoma!”, Hart will regale the piano player, the bartender and writer and grammar scold E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a fellow “genius” (“Charlotte’s Web”) who will serve as foil for his increasingly lurid descriptions of his too, too-young “protege,” Elizabeth.
She’s a Yale gal with Broadway ambitions played by Margaret Qualley.
Hawke, his hair thinning, dyed and slicked and his height reduced by camera tricks, puffs and puffs away, letting his “vulnerabilities” out even as he insists he’ll bring back “the cloak” as his shoulder won’t let him don and doff overcoats, that he’s “throwing a huge party tonight” at his apartment and everyone’s invited and that he has a rodent intruder in his flat that he’s named “Stuart,” something White (author of “Stuart Little”) takes great care in jotting down in his notebook.
And he’ll bed that coed, by God, by dawn!
The film’s longeurs all take a back seat to Qualley’s big scene, trying to erase the on-the-make sexpots she’s played in the past as she not-quite-demurely relates Elizabeth’s sexual history to an almost drooling-at-the-hearing Hart.
Aside from her, not enough is done with the supporting players to make this movie fly by.
Scott’s interesting, indulgent but almost parental Rodgers is joined with a colorless take on Rodgers’ new book and lyrics partner Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney). White is properly depicted as a quiet, reporterly poet and wordsmith, but Kennedy makes no impression in the role.
And Cannavale is just a generic, tolerant and friendly bartender who knows this barfly well and who wants to do right by him, even if that means serving that drink order that the sanitorium-sobered Hart might use to fall off the wagon.
But Hawke, Linklater’s muse and alter ego in the “Before Sunrise” pictures, and “Boyhood,” is at his very best, here, crooning with a lyricist’s (passable, polished but not Broadway bound) singing voice, quipping and cutting and saying “I’m not jealous” and “I’m not bitter” when we know he’s both.
Look at the shows he co-wrote, and the ones Rodgers went on to do after Hart and count “revivals.”
Linklater’s direction has a staid reverence for the subject that robs the movie of any hope of joy. There’s wit, but a kind of standoffishness that drowned the Kevin Kline Cole Porter “De-Lovely” over twenty years ago. And Porter? He was even wittier.
Gay, voyeur, bisexual, what have you. You can make your character “discrete,” as all who knew Hart insist he was. But there’s no sense in treating this like a 1940s taboo in a 2025 film.
Linklater’s “Nouevelle Vague” and “Me and Orson Welles” pretty much danced off the screen. This sad subject may not allow for much of that. But more of what made Hart special — aside from the cutting remarks and observations — begs to come out, and doesn’t.
Rating: R, smoking, sexual content, profanity
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney and Bobby Cannavale.
Credits: Directed by Richard Linklater, scripted by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland. A Sony Pictures Classics release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:40
