Festival Review: Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater)
Plot in a nutshell
After leaving the premiere of Oklahoma! in disgust, notorious lyricists Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) spends the night in a bar, unspooling his life to anyone who cares to listen, as he waits for his long-time partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) to come for the after party so he can pretend to congratulate him but really pitch him a new idea.
Richard Linklater reunites with Ethan Hawke after a decade to deliver a one-man-show in the form of a linguistically-driven chamber piece and something resembling a biography of Lorenz Hart. The forgotten genius lyricist who the remembered genius composer Richard Rodgers worked with, before the latter paired up with Oscar Hammerstein and formed the infamous Rodgers-Hammerstein partnership.
Similar to Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy (1999), which was about the British musical duo equivalent of Gilbert and Sullivan, you needn’t be a fan of Golden Age musicals to be completely captured by the stories of these men and their approach to art. In Linklater’s case, 95% of the film is set in a single location with 80% of that setting in a bar where Hart drowns his sorrows and waxes lyrical, philosophical and cynical about how he found himself at this point in his life. A recovering alcoholic whose joie de vivre wrestles with his melancholy in perpetuity, while he slowly slips off the wagon, one whiskey shot at a time.
Hawke plays Hart like a man possessed. The film is written so as to give him room to suck up all the oxygen and he does so brilliantly; with a somewhat distracting hairline and contact lenses that make him look like he’s channeling John Malkovich. Through Hart’s monologues and interactions with the barkeep (a perfectly sardonic Bobby Cannavale), real-life famous children’s book author E.B. White (a calmingly present Patrick Kennedy), his protege and ungettable emblem of desire Elizabeth Weiland (an endearing Margaret Qualley) Rodgers (the ever-reliable Scott), we get a portrait of a complicated artist and human being, with the gift of the gab and cursed with a victim complex.
Hart’s famous songs - “My Funny Valentine”, “Manhattan” and of course, “Blue Moon” - get a whole new complexion once we see this tragicomic portrayal, which evokes both awe and sadness in equal measure. It’s a very funny, very watchable movie, thanks to Hawke’s can’t-take-your-eyes-away-from-it performance and Robert Kaplow’s screenplay that’s filled with so many zingers and witty quips it’s impossible to catch them all in one sitting.
Far from being Linklater’s best work, with dips, lulls and predictable outcomes dragging the story down a few notches, Blue Moon is still well worth investing your time. If for nothing else but to see a masterful performance of a creative force of nature who now, deservedly, gets the spotlight he never got in life.