Blue Moon

The Exclamation Point at the End of the World

There’s a special kind of loneliness that belongs to the loudest person in the room, the one who keeps talking because silence would force something honest out into the air. That feeling sits all over Richard Linklater’s *Blue Moon*, which strands us inside Sardi’s on the rainy night of March 31, 1943. Outside, *Oklahoma!* is changing American musical theater. Inside, Lorenz Hart is getting drunk and talking himself in circles. Ethan Hawke plays Rodgers’ abandoned former lyricist like a man trying to outrun irrelevance with sheer velocity, and the performance is so frayed I found myself wanting to lean back from the screen and give him room.

Linklater and Hawke have been in conversation on film for three decades now, and this feels like the sour aftertaste to the *Before* movies’ belief in connection. Those were about possibility. This one is about watching the future arrive and realizing it no longer has a seat for you.



The physical transformation gets your attention first. Hawke wears this tragic, architectural combover, and Linklater uses a mix of camera placement and old-fashioned staging tricks—sometimes literally dropping him lower in frame—to suggest Hart’s five-foot stature. But the more striking change is how tightly Hawke holds himself. He usually carries an easy slouch, a kind of worn-in cool. Here he’s wound up so tight he seems to hum. He grips his whiskey like it’s equal parts flotation device and blade, slicing through conversations with bitter jokes to the bartender, played by Bobby Cannavale with a perfectly weathered patience. Hart sneers at Rodgers and Hammerstein’s bright frontier optimism and fixates on the indignity of that exclamation point in the title. Peter Bradshaw at *The Guardian* caught the cracked bravado of the performance when he wrote, "Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he’s just been to see... he acidly calls it Okla-homo."

What makes the performance stick, though, is the panic underneath all that wit. Maybe I’m projecting, but Hart’s blend of jealousy, shame, and self-dramatizing misery feels painfully recognizable. Most people know some version of that feeling: smiling through someone else’s triumph while something inside you is tearing.



The whole movie shifts when Richard Rodgers finally comes to the afterparty. Andrew Scott, who won a Silver Bear at Berlinale for the role, plays him without villainy. He looks tired. Really tired. When he sits across from Hart, his shoulders seem to drop several inches. He’s not angry so much as emptied out by a decade of trying to rescue someone who won’t take the rope. There’s a quietly brutal exchange where Hart throws out a line meant to summon the old rhythm between them. Rodgers smiles, but only with his mouth. His eyes are done. That sliver of distance between expression and feeling is where the partnership dies for good.



I’m less convinced by how the film handles Hart’s sexuality than by how sharply it understands his professional resentment. Hart calls himself "omnisexual" and directs a blend of yearning, flirtation, and aesthetic fascination toward Elizabeth Weiland, played by Margaret Qualley with a bright, practical sharpness. She wants what Hart can offer her professionally, and she very reasonably does not want to be crushed under the emotional weight he drags around. Qualley is terrific. The script, though, sometimes treats Hart’s closeted reality as one more eccentricity in his self-destructive arsenal, when it was probably the deepest wound in the room.

Still, Linklater has no interest in sanding this down into a respectable biopic. *Blue Moon* plays more like a ghost story with the ghost stubbornly still alive, ordering another drink. It’s about what happens when the tune changes and leaves you behind. Hart keeps insisting the new song is beneath him. The movie knows better. Eventually the night ends, the bill lands, and there’s no one left to hand it to.