Blue Moon (2025)
Richard Linklater’s chamber piece about Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart ought to work. On paper, it’s got everything: theatrical intimacy, a fascinating historical moment, and Ethan Hawke doing his thing. In practice, though, it’s more talk than substance, mistaking endless dialogue for emotional depth and performance showcase for actual storytelling. The whole affair unfolds in Sardi’s restaurant on the evening of 31 March 1943, as Hart watches from the bar while his former collaborator Richard Rodgers celebrates the opening night of Oklahoma!, the groundbreaking musical written with new partner Oscar Hammerstein. Hart drinks, talks, drinks some more, and talks even more.
There’s genuine potential in this setup. Hart has been replaced, both professionally and personally, and he’s drowning his irrelevance in whiskey and conversation. He holds court with bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and various theatrical figures who drift through his orbit, all the time clinging to a fantasy that Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a college student he met briefly at a cabin, might offer him romantic salvation. It’s both a wake and a last stand, as Hart confronts not just his professional obsolescence but the deeper terror that he might be fundamentally unlovable.
Hawke’s performance has won considerable praise, and the technical skill is undeniable. He delivers Robert Kaplow’s dialogue with precision, capturing Hart’s manic intellectualism and barely contained anguish. But something feels off. The performance strikes me as mechanical rather than lived-in, a demonstration of craft instead of organic inhabitation. Hawke talks incessantly about Casablanca, about lyrical technique, about the superiority of buddy films over romances, yet the constant stream of cultural commentary exhausts rather than enlightens. You start to wonder whether Linklater and Kaplow have mistaken relentless articulation for genuine feeling.
The film’s theatrical origins become its primary weakness. Linklater has essentially filmed a stage play, and not a particularly cinematic one. The camera observes Hart’s deterioration with polite distance, occasionally punctuating scenes with close-ups that feel dutiful rather than insightful. The single-location approach, which could generate real intensity, instead produces artificial containment. We never escape Sardi’s, never breathe air that isn’t thick with cigarette smoke and Hart’s desperate monologues. It’s suffocating in ways I don’t think Linklater intended.
More troubling is the film’s treatment of Hart’s height and sexuality. The decision to use visual effects to shrink Hawke, making Hart’s sub-five-foot stature a constant visual element, verges on the grotesque. What should be a biographical detail becomes something close to a sight gag, undermining the pathos the film is supposedly after. The handling of Hart’s homosexuality is equally problematic, gesturing toward his queerness through knowing glances and coded dialogue rather than engaging with it honestly. This might be historically accurate to 1943, but it leaves Hart’s interior life frustratingly opaque. We’re observing him from the outside, never quite getting in.
The supporting cast does better work with less material. Qualley brings genuine warmth to Elizabeth, though the character exists mainly as an impossible object of desire rather than a complete person. Andrew Scott shows up late as Rodgers and immediately lifts the film. His scenes with Hawke crackle with unspoken history and real hurt, hinting at a more interesting film that might have examined their creative partnership rather than just watching its aftermath from a barstool.
Kaplow’s screenplay demonstrates impressive research. The musical theatre references are impeccable, the period detail meticulous. But it substitutes theatrical insider knowledge for universal human experience. Unless you possess substantial familiarity with 1940s Broadway history, much of the dialogue feels like elaborate name-dropping. The temporal gimmick of confining everything to real-time becomes less Aristotelian unity and more arbitrary restriction. Why this choice? What does it achieve beyond making the film feel longer than its 100 minutes?
What Blue Moon fundamentally lacks is necessity. By the end, you’re left wondering why this story needed cinematic treatment rather than remaining a stage production or radio play, formats where Hart’s incessant monologues might feel less visually deadening. Linklater has made an affectionate but static tribute to a forgotten artist, a film that respects its subject without quite understanding why contemporary audiences should care about his tragedy beyond scholarly interest.
Musical theatre devotees and Linklater completists will find modest rewards here. General audiences seeking emotional engagement or cinematic vitality will likely find it a punishing exercise in aesthetic confinement. Hart deserved better than obsolescence. Ironically, this film about his irrelevance risks rendering him irrelevant all over again, preserving him in amber rather than bringing him to life.