'Blue Moon' review: Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater chase the ghost of Lorenz Hart

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

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Anyone with even a passing knowledge of musical theater will recognize the name Richard Rodgers — one half of the legendary duo Rodgers & Hammerstein — but fewer are familiar with the team that came before: Rodgers & Hart.

From that forgotten partnership, Richard Linklater builds “Blue Moon,” a stagey, talk-heavy drama in which a superb cast, buried under layers of hair, makeup, and wigs, brings to life the story of a lyricist who refused to conform and watched Broadway’s taste evolve around him.

That lyricist is Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, in a transformative turn that uses clever camera tricks and forced perspective to make the 5’10” actor appear under five feet). Hart was once a giant of the musical theater world, penning classics like “My Funny Valentine” and, of course, “Blue Moon.” A brilliant, volatile mind and an unapologetic truth-teller, Hart’s influence still reverberates through generations of songwriters.

But “Blue Moon” isn’t interested in the glamour of his heyday. Instead, Linklater and writer Robert Kaplow (adapting from real letters between Hart and poet Elizabeth Weiland, played with irresistible charm by Margaret Qualley) focus on the twilight of his life. The film opens with his death in November 1943 before flashing back six months to the premiere of “Oklahoma!,” the first show Rodgers wrote without him, and is an instant, seismic hit. Hart knows it the moment he hears the opening number. “If you ever see a musical with an exclamation point in the title, run,” he quips to a bartender at Sardi’s after the show.

That after-party becomes the entire setting of “Blue Moon,” and while the concept gives the film an intriguing, real-time theatricality, it also traps it in its own cleverness. The single-location setup grows repetitive as a parade of luminaries — E.B. White, Richard Rodgers, and Weiland herself — drift in and out. Weiland becomes the film’s emotional throughline, the one person Hart longs to confess his love to, even as the world assumes he’s queer. Hawke doesn’t play him as a caricature but as a wounded, restless man oscillating between ego and despair.

Linklater leans into the chamber-piece quality, filling the room with cigarette smoke, snappy “Casablanca” references, and talk of war and art that simmer with subtext. The result is an elegant, cerebral hangout film about a man watching his era end. Yet as the conversation loops and the walls close in, so does the movie. Spending nearly ninety minutes in Hart’s company can feel as exhausting as the man himself, a creative genius too bitter and broken to see past his own insecurities.

Andrew Scott makes a sharp impression as Rodgers, a man moving on without sentimentality, while Qualley delivers the film’s best moment in a raw, confessional monologue about desire and self-delusion. Still, her sporadic presence leaves a noticeable gap, and the film’s insistence that she’s twenty strains credibility.

“Blue Moon” plays like a cautionary tale Eugene O’Neill might have written after one too many martinis: sharp, bitter, and steeped in regret. Linklater has tackled nearly every genre imaginable, but his gift for creating “hangout movies” remains unmatched. “Dazed and Confused” this is not, yet “Blue Moon” captures the cigarette-stained pulse of 1940s Broadway with intoxicating detail. For theater devotees, it’s pure catnip, full of sly historical nods, witty banter, and insider Easter eggs. But as the smoke thickens and the conversations circle, “Blue Moon” begins to feel like the dying gasp of its own subject: brilliant, tragic, and just a little too in love with its own melancholy.

Grade: B- 

BLUE MOON opens in theaters Friday, October 24th.