Lorenz Hart is singing in the rain. Seconds later, he’s collapsed in an alley, no longer with a song in his heart, abandoned with the rest of the Broadway trash. He’ll perish from pneumonia hours later in a nearby hospital, at age 48.
That’s how Richard Linklater opens his new film Blue Moon, spoilers be damned, and it neatly summarizes, in one pitiless tracking sequence, the spectrum of Hart’s too-short life—creative genius acquiesces to self-destructive nihilism.
But mostly, this is not a film of elaborate crane shots in inclement weather. Virtuosic camerawork will take a backseat to words, words and more words as we settle into the narrative of Blue Moon: Hart holding court in the famous Manhattan theater bar Sardi’s on the opening night in March 1943 of Oklahoma!, the first musical that his former creative partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), composed without him. As Hart settles into the wood-paneled bar, with its red walls, thick burgundy drapes and myriad untold secrets, Blue Moon will fit nicely into Linklater’s tradition of duration-driven dramas — 1990’s Slacker, 2001’s Tape, 2005’s Before Sunset — which seem to eliminate the usual chasms between real time and cinematic time.
Hart, we soon realize, can be a lot. Though short in stature — he was barely 5 feet tall — he is played, sensationally, by Hawke as the perpetual center of attention. After departing Oklahoma! before it’s finished, Hart enters Sardi’s in a heavy winter coat and black fedora, cigar a-dangle, looking every bit like Orson Welles after Ozempic, and consuming just as much of the room’s oxygen. With the bartender (a long-faced and nuanced Bobby Cannavale) offering a sympathetic ear, Hart begins to unload a torrent of grievances, initially targeting his old writing partner’s flyover-state musical with the egregious exclamation mark, and the audience that was eating it up: “People roaring at third-rate jokes … demand more!” he implores, adding that Oklahoma’s absence of an edge will ensure its multigenerational endurance. But, he complains, “who wants inoffensive art?”
Eventually, we learn that Hart, despite his closeted reputation, is hopelessly smitten with Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old student at Yale who will be appearing soon at the after-party. In the meantime, Hart, while at once denying and indulging in his alcoholism, will chat up anyone in the circumference of his voice—including the bar’s piano player, an aspiring show tune composer; and E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who happens to be hiding in a banquette, quietly conceiving of Stuart Little, when Hart ropes the fellow writer into his caustic worldview.
It’s hard to overpraise Hawke’s portrayal of Hart, capturing every facet of his outsized personality while disappearing into the part, graceless comb-over and all. The underrated Born to Be Blue (2015), in which Hawke played another turbulent music genius, Chet Baker, feels like a (not-so) dry run for this masterful showcase.
Quoting Shakespeare one minute and a filthy homophobic joke the next, Hawke’s Hart is voluble, mercurial, ornery, charming, and probably the smartest guy in the room. He perpetuates wisdom and BS with equal alacrity. By the time Rodgers and the Oklahoma! crew enter the bar to the fawning praise of hangers-on, Hart publicly sings the show’s praises while saving his verbal daggers for private one-on-ones, vacillating between a combative animal looking for his next kill to a needy puppy dog seeking creative succor, for what is a Broadway lyricist without a composer? When Rodgers, who describes his vocation as “a business,” invites Hart to co-write an update to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court despite his former partner’s crippling alcoholism and unhealthy working habits, it’s hard to see this tossed bone as anything but a pity collaboration. Hart is always the smaller man, in more ways than one.
Blue Moon could have been another Last Call — the dreary 2020 drama with Rhys Ifans as Dylan Thomas, as the Welsh poet drinks himself to death in a New York City tavern — but Linklater and his screenwriter, Robert Kaplow, weave in frequent irony and acrid humor to leaven the downbeat heart of the story. The film can feel stagebound, even if it wasn’t written for the theater, occasionally evoking those solo, or nearly solo, plays in which a towering figure like Winston Churchill or Simon Wiesenthal riffs on their life to an unseen audience. But Blue Moon is never stilted, it never drags, and in fact is so breezily quotable that its cerebral script deserves a second viewing.
Is Sardi’s an interregnum for Hart — a liminal space between art and life? The more time we spend with Hart, and the more humiliations he suffers over the course of one night, the bar becomes less a bardo and more the circles of Hell, with Hart himself responsible for the geometry. His gift of gab, potent at the film’s outset, no longer retains its spellbinding hold on strangers. People address him directly with a posthumous kindness, as if they’re already writing his eulogy. Sublime and sympathetic to its subject even at his lowest ebbs, Blue Moon is an elegy for a certain type of show business hedonist that doesn’t exist anymore. This deficit is to our culture’s detriment.
BLUE MOON. Director: Richard Linklater; Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Jonah Lees, Patrick Kennedy; Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics; Rated R; Playing now at Regal Royal Palm, Movies of Delray, Cinemark Bistro Boca Raton and other area theaters