Hawke plays with campy brilliance and criminal combover the lyricist Lorenz Hart as he spirals into vinegary jilted despair after his split from Richard Rodgers
Relevance and love don’t slam a door in your face. They just stop thinking about you.
This idea is at the core of Richard Linklater’s excellent “Blue Moon,” a writer’s yin to the director’s yang of his also-upcoming “Nouvelle Vague.” Wherein that film is about the art of the director via the making of Jean Luc-Godard’s “Breathless,” this one captures the heart of the writer through one of the last nights in the life of Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), who was once one of the most acclaimed Broadway songwriters on the scene before fame and passion stopped returning his calls. He’s now the drunk at the end of the bar, the guy who gets there first and leaves last, and the one who can barely hide the pain behind his non-stop commentary on film, Broadway, and everything else around him. Working from a script by Robert Kaplow, Linklater has crafted one of his finest dramedies, a consistently fascinating exploration of the frailty of the artist, buoyed by one of Ethan Hawke’s most remarkable performances.
As part of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes. The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.
Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair; Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little; and Qualley plays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film imagines Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love. Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.
Richard Linklater
The Self-Taught Auteur
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1960, Richard Linklater is a central figure in the American independent film renaissance. Unlike many of his contemporaries who attended film school, Linklater is entirely self-taught. He worked on an offshore oil rig to save money for equipment, moved to Austin, and founded the Austin Film Society in 1985.
His career is defined by a deep curiosity about the human experience, particularly how it intersects with the passage of time. From the rambling structure of Slacker to the 12-year production of Boyhood, Linklater constantly challenges traditional narrative forms.
"I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life... the seemingly insignificant moments that end up shaping us the most."
.jpg)