Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon opens on a note so unexpectedly forlorn that it reverberates through everything that follows.
A classic lounge number drifts over a rain-sheened alley. Into this slumps a diminutive man — hat slipping, thinning combover exposed, body folding like a cigarette collapsing in ash.
This is Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), the legendary lyricist, glimpsed at the very end of his life: he will soon die of pneumonia at just 48. The camera pulls back, leaving him fallen as a radio reel dutifully recites his achievements. Among them, the titular “Blue Moon”, a song Hart will shortly confess to holding in little regard.
Seven months earlier March 31st, 1943 — the opening night of Rodgers (Hart’s former creative partner) and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!. Hart is alive and moderately well, if far from happy; sparking with wit and despair in, initially, equal measure.
Linklater stages almost the entire film inside a lovingly recreated Sardi’s — a warm, wood-panelled cocoon where Hart performs for an audience that mostly humours him. The chamber-piece structure compresses the story into a single night and a single space; sharpening every gesture, every line, every heartbreak.
Presiding over it is Bobby Cannavale’s bartender, Eddie; who indulges Hart with weary affection, only reluctantly pouring him drinks. Their rapport is rooted in a long-running game: fluently trading Casablanca lines, with Hart theatrically denouncing the worst line (“breaking a precedent”) and praising the best (“nobody ever loved me that much”). The latter may be key to Hart’s psyche.
Into this self-contained ecosystem wanders beloved author E. B. White (played with laconic understatement by Patrick Kennedy). White listens gently, eruditely, but with the wary air of a man who knows that entering Hart’s orbit means risking the undertow of his self-involvement.
Working again with Hawke, his closest collaborator for three decades, Linklater finally finds the moment they’ve long said Hawke needed to “age into.” Hawke undergoes a startling transformation: shaved crown, thinning combover, dark contact lenses, and a posture so diminished he seems nearly a foot shorter (Hart himself was reportedly 4’10”). His face is a weather system — charm breaking into storm clouds and clearing again, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. This wide-eyed, delirious focus gives Hart a self-reflexive volatility.
Kaplow’s screenplay, loosely biographical, reshapes events to suit its emotional truth. It introduces Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a vivacious, bleach-blonde muse-friend who sees Hart as a beloved confidant; not as the romantic figure he desperately wishes to be.
In a scene rendered with disarming sincerity, she recounts losing her virginity; Hart presses his hand to his heart, urging her on, desperate to stay within any moment that resembles intimacy. Later, her own confession — being pathetically in love with someone unattainable —mirrors Hart’s condition so closely that the echo only deepens his cosmic loneliness.
Hart’s tragedy is inseparable from his art: He must love a show in order to write it. For Rodgers (played by Andrew Scott with controlled lightness), composition can be simply a job. This difference, along with Harts’ uncontrolled drinking, has become the crack where their partnership has splintered.
Words are everything to Hart — his disdain for Oklahoma! (“a hit and shit”) is due to what he perceives as its cornpone earnestness, in lieu of verbal dexterity. He tries to be gracious, but beneath the banter lies a man who believes that if he can tell his story in exactly the right words, love — or at least meaning — might flicker into existence. The film observes him, kindly yet unflinchingly, as he raconteurs his way toward oblivion.
Cinematographer Shane F. Kelly bathes the bar in warm ambers and bruised blues, letting cigarette smoke soften the edges of each frame. Graham Reynolds’s score slips between jazz standards and near-silence (excluding Hart’s holding court).
Blue Moon becomes a study in emotional claustrophobia, as Hart chases love, legacy, sobriety, and memory, losing each as the night proceeds. By compressing everything into one night — the most devastating night — Linklater echoes the bittersweet world of Hart’s own songs: wistful, romantic, sometimes cynical, always reaching for transcendence. The titular “Blue Moon” is withheld until a devastating late moment, at which point it lands as a fitting epitaph: “Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.”
The result is one of Linklater’s most quietly devastating works: an elegant, elegiac character study that refuses to romanticize Lorenz Hart even as it mourns him. A portrait not of genius, but of the sadness genius cannot soothe.
