Blue Moon 2025

The best thing Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) ever wrote was the song ‘Blue Moon’, a timeless standard covered by the likes of Elvis, Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald — and he hates it. Like many artists, he resents the tossed-off, gorgeous simplicity of his work most embraced by the public. His former composing partner of two decades, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), has moved on to work with Oscar Hammerstein. Their first work together, Oklahoma!, was the kind of breakout hit Rodgers and Hart always chased, but never quite achieved. Opening night, 1943, only months before his untimely death at the hands of pneumonia (and alcoholism), and Hart is losing himself in a bottle at famed Broadway hotspot Sardi’s, waiting for the newly minted megahit pair to make their entrance to the afterparty. Short, balding, and often exasperatingly verbose, Hart wins admirers easily, but keeps few friends, and is romantically obsessed with his ‘protégé’, a Yale student named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) with whom the quite probably queer Hart has an exceedingly complicated, all-consuming relationship.  

With performances pitched high, the script from Robert Kaplow (who also wrote Linklater’s underrated Me & Orson Welles) is packed with florid monologues and crackling exchanges of dialogue, and an appreciably theatrical execution, Blue Moon is a display of director Richard Linklater’s masterful management of tone, rhythm and tension, ensuring that the film remains enthrallingly cinematic even as the action largely plays out in a single space. Through it all, an exceptional Hawke rivets us to the screen. Exasperating, exhausting, heartbreaking, funny, catty; Hawke’s Hart is a self-aggrandising has-been, painfully aware of his own shortcomings and, whether by high-minded ego or fear, tragically unable to allow himself to make something that connects (one suspects he and the Coens’ titular Llewyn Davis finding much to commiserate about). Linklater surrounds Hawke with a fine cast — Bobby Cannavale plays the Sardi’s bartender, a man of saintly patience; Qualley is statuesque and elusive as the apple of Hart’s eye. Best is Scott, whose Rodgers, far from being a vindictive or callous Brutus to Hart’s Caesar, is merely a humble, good-hearted workhorse, tired of Hart’s endless drunken shenanigans. The quiet devastation of Hart’s lonely, desperate decline simmers beneath it all, made all the tougher by the man’s own awareness of his forthcoming doom. — Tom Augustine