Blue Moon

I found a certain similarity between 2025's BLUE MOON and 2008's ME AND ORSON WELLES, both directed by Richard Linklater.  Namely in their final moments, when the terrible reality of show business bares its fangs.  Both films are loving remembrances of simpler, yet certainly not gentler eras.  BLUE MOON is an examination of lyricist Lorenz Hart, who for several years teamed with composer Richard Rodgers.  Toasts of Broadway behind such hits as Pal Joey and Babes in Arms.  You may not be familiar with Hart, certainly not as much as with Rodgers' later collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II.

From the moment we see Lorenz Hart, played with great investment by Ethan Hawke, said realities are painfully transparent.   He's severely inebriated, stumbling in the rain.  Onscreen titles tell us he would pass away later that evening.  Cut to several months earlier, March 31st, 1943.  Oklahoma!, penned by Rodgers and Hammerstein, debuts at the St. James Theatre.  Hart bows out early to assume a seat at Sardi's.  Alcohol perhaps ruined his old partnership and despite his spot at the bar he's been sober for some time.  Sworn a pact with his friend and bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale).  Hart will spend the movie ruminating on his life, his stalled career, and his desires, sexual and otherwise.  How much he hates the lyrics of the new musical and forever questioning why the title has that damned exclamation point.

Linklater keeps his film mostly at the bar and within a sphere not far beyond.  Akin to a filmed play, yet never stagy; his direction is fluid.  Robert Kaplow's screenplay is dialogue heavy.  The director likes his many of films that way, some of which had starred Hawke.  His Oscar-nominated performance has received much attention.  It is the sort of role actors crave -  lengthy monologues and frequent emotional crescendos.  For Ethan, also the opportunity to shed his handsome veneer (and tall stature) to play a rumpled poor soul with an awful combover.  He really immerses himself here.  At certain times I felt it was too much of a performance, too showy.  But that was probably who Lorenz Hart really was.  Theatrical and uncommonly articulate - masks for deep sorrow.  The actor brings it across beautifully.

BLUE MOON is a sad tale of loss, abandonment.  An inability to be oneself in an environment hostile to those with unconventional proclivities.  Yet also in the broader, more universally relatable sense a tale of unrequited love.  The pain of loving someone "that way" and not having the feelings returned.  Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth, a confident yet wracked with self doubt college student for whom Lorenz pines.  Hoping tonight he will at last consummate his union, one that failed to come off during a weekend some time ago.  In a lengthy scene in a coatroom Elizabeth relays her failure with a young buck she fancies, then confirms Lorenz's worst fears, that she only sees him as a friend.

Then, in the last moments of the film, hardly acknowledges her friend after she meets Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott).  Echoes of Linkater's aforementioned earlier film, when Orson Welles' young charge is first courted for the role of Lucius in Caesar, then discarded.  At the same time learning the young producer he is in love with has spent a night with Welles.  They always said there was a broken heart for every light on Broadway.

P.S. - Patrick Kennedy has an impressive turn as essayist E.B. White, who in this fictionalization is inspired by Hart to write a certain classic children's novel.