There was Dewey Finn, Ned Schneebly, Willoughby, Mason Evans Sr.––now there’s Lorenz (or Larry) Hart. Richard Linklater likes a certain type of guy, and maybe these features come across too infrequently in his female characters: charismatic, voluble, verbose, enthusiastic as a puppy, and if prone to morose stretches, never in a way that destabilizes an essential upbeat humanism.
Blue Moon, which world-premiered at the Berlinale, is another beautifully personal work from Linklater, full of authorial idiosyncrasies and tics, but distinguishing the film from his corpus is it being the kind you can only make at a mature career stage. It’s not so much that Linklater has nothing to prove––screenplays like Robert Kaplow’s and its rarified, remote milieu of mid-WWII New York theaterland can typically send financiers balking. With a “legacy” career, little favors and gives come your way; for Linklater, maybe his next will be a legitimate awards contender, and new relationships with acting talent can be brought to bear. And different or lower expectations for the end product allow him to really express who he is as an artist at this point in his life.
Yet on the timely subject of awards-campaigning, as Ethan Hawke gets older and even more respectable, some areas of the industry could well call him due. Blue Moon thankfully evades being an “Oscar movie,” but portraying Lorenz Hart is an Oscar role. It just hits so many of the beats (or syllable stresses, given his provenance as a librettist): reams of dialogue to chew on, vast emotional range deftly calibrated, a slight physical transformation. Perhaps we feel overly conscious of this to the extent that it becomes dissonantly noticeable, with Hawke’s pleading mannerisms to his scene partners (and awards body members beyond the screen), yet it’s that fundamental Linklaterian garrulousness and charm that defeats this impulse.
We’re in the familiar yet still potent domain of bruised artistic egos, backstage drama, and subtle yet vital shifts in popular culture. Hart, who’s trying to have a more functional relationship with alcohol, is in a defeated hangdog mode at Sardi’s Bar in Midtown, awaiting his old partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and his entourage as they celebrate the theatrical premiere of Oklahoma! There are three key portions of the screenplay, which gladly don’t equate to a rigid, three-act structure: an introduction where we learn of Hart’s inconsistent genius and many personal limitations; an emotive reunion with Rodgers (who will still collaborate with him, though not as a primary partner) and sincere congratulatory handshake to his lyricist replacement Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney); and an intimate duologue with young protegé Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whose incandescent appeal for him challenges the homosexual identity he comfortably inhabits.
Not dissimilar to Peter Hujar’s Day, another recent festival premiere, Kaplow’s screenplay takes published correspondence between Hart and Weiland as one of his primary sources. Their scenes are curious and undeniably effective, yet we can still have questions. If Linklater wasn’t such a consummate director of dialogue––has any American filmmaker made conventional visual storytelling seem so easily discardable?––perhaps the 20-year-old Weiland telling Hart about her attempts to finally lose her virginity would feel awkward and a bit letchy. It nevertheless provides the most overt allusion to sex in a film where it darkly shadows everything, locked in repression with ’60s liberation still far away.
There are no moments where the dramaturgy stops and we hear larger passages from the title number, “Everything Happens to Me,” “Isn’t it Romantic?” et al––a-cappella sung, and spare piano-backed snippets are their mode of inclusion. Yet it’s such a naturally musical and flowing film, which you could really feel the crowd at my screening respond to. Hart is very endearing, and even if we aren’t American Songbook composers in 1943, his very human characteristics speak to all of what ails us: our pride, vanity, and fear of obsolescence, none of which are innate to aging. We fade out of the lives of ephemeral loved ones, until we’re, as the song mournfully tells, “standing alone.”
Blue Moon premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.