And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
Blue Moon (2025)
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
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.
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