Blue Moon Movie Review: Ethan Hawke Excels in Director Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Parting Tale

Breaking up from the better-known partner in a showbiz double act is a dangerous business. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also occasionally recorded placed in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a success when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie occurs, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the film conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about a factor seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the songs?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in the land down under.