Blue Moon

Grade: A-

I’ll tell you several things that Blue Moon isn’t. It’s not a cookie cutter biopic that follows the usual formula. It doesn’t have multiple scenes and locations, or jump around in time. It doesn’t have some of it in color and other parts in B&W, leaving us to wonder why. It does have a few captions at the end that tell us what happened to some of the main players, but it’s not belabored. What we get is at least as rich as any traditional biopic could be, and better than any I could imagine. Director Richard Linklater thinks outside a box that’s several boxes away from ours.

Linklater has executed some innovative ideas that never would have occurred to me, and I haven’t heard of anyone else trying. He filmed Boyhood in sequence, off-and-on over the course of 12 years – so the actors would age as the characters did. Blue Moon could be a play. Almost all of it takes place at Sardi’s. It’s March 31, 1943, and they are getting ready for the opening night party for Oklahoma! – the first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration. Before Richard Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to go on to be one of the biggest musical theatre partnerships of all time, there was Rodgers and Hart. Lorenz Hart provided lyrics for Rodgers’s music for 24 years, until Hart became more and more unreliable to work with, due to his alcoholism and mental health issues. On this night, though, Hart is trying to be a good sport by not only attending Oklahoma!’s opening night, but showing up at the party.

Carrying the film as Lorenz Hart – with all his insecurities, projections, and quirkiness – is Ethan Hawke, doing the strongest work of his career in one of the best performances of the year. The portrayal is so flamboyant and theatrical, that I never forgot it was an actor, but I frequently forgot it was Hawke. I learn that Hart, famously, was quite short. Through the use of clever camera angles, oversized set pieces, actors standing on unseen platforms, and costume tricks, Linklater successfully makes everyone and everything tower over the 5’10” Hawke. I didn’t find it distracting; the most I ever thought about it was “Hm, I didn’t realize Hawke was so short.”

Rather than flashbacks or scenes taking place elsewhere, Blue Moon stays at Sardi’s, and relies on dialogue and actors’ portrayals to paint all the pictures. We see it almost literally killing Hart to put on the “good sport” act, as he graciously congratulates R&H when they arrive, in addition to the other conversations – many of which are one-sided – he has. The movie is a series of Hart telling stories, desperately reminding people who he is, and hijacking chats to make it about himself. “Let’s work together again! We can write a show about this, and then do this and this and this, etc…!”

I got second-hand frustration and impatience as I watched Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers, 1917), as Rodgers, humoring and placating Hart as he goes off about his delusions of grandeur with future collaborations. Hart’s warped musings are on the same level as Charlize Theron’s in Young Adult. Bobby Cannavale and Margaret Qualley are great as a couple of other long-suffering listeners.

Hart’s drinking ultimately did him in, as he died less than a year after the night depicted in Blue Moon. As we are told this at the beginning, a bittersweetness looms throughout. We know Hart’s proposed projects and pipe dreams will never get off the ground. Blue Moon looks beautiful, visually, and is masterfully made in a way only Linklater could do. Hawke is dynamic and heartbreaking as a man who we see standing alone, without a dream in his heart, without a love of his own.

Grade: A-