Richard Linklater is spending 2025 in the past, courtesy of his upcoming French New Wave homage Nouvelle Vague as well as Blue Moon, and the latter—which just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its Oct. 17 theatrical release—demonstrates that he knows his way around yesterday.
A lovingly melancholy tribute to famed 20th-century songwriter Lorenz Hart during the last stanza of his life, the film is a one-night-only character study brimming with intellect, passion, sorrow, and bold, idiosyncratic personality, all of it embodied by a magnificent Ethan Hawke as the eccentric and elegiac lyricist. It’s not just for musical theater historians; as talkative as his Before trilogy, Linklater’s latest is a moving and multifaceted ode to a bygone era and an artist whose creativity and contradictions were equally titanic.
On March 13, 1943, Lorenz walks into Sardi’s, unaware that in seven months, he’ll be found dying of pneumonia in a rainy alley. On this particular evening, his mind is mostly occupied by anguished thoughts about Oklahoma!, whose premiere he’s just ditched, and whose runaway success appears to be a foregone conclusion.
Lorenz has had no part in the production because his longtime partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) has, for the first time in their careers, teamed with someone else: Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). As he saddles up to the bar manned by Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), Lorenz is animated and gregarious, commanding the room via a verbose performance whose sparse spectators include a coat check clerk, a cigarette girl, and piano player Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees), whom he dubs “Knuckles.”
Nonetheless, there’s sadness lurking beneath his smiling façade, and despite his promises that he’s off the bottle, he convinces Eddie to pour him a shot of whiskey and, beside it, a corresponding measure of club soda—a figurative angel-devil choice that’s destined to be won by the latter.
Author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) soon joins the audience of Lorenz’s one-man show, whose topics range from his least favorite line in Casablanca (“A precedent is being broken”), his partiality toward that film’s star Claude Rains—who, like him, is of diminutive stature—and his “irrational adoration” of 20-year-old Yale sophomore and aspiring poet Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), whom he expects will soon arrive at Sardi’s.
The legendary midtown establishment is additionally the location of the Oklahoma! afterparty, and Lorenz’s anxiety about facing Rodgers (whom he feels has abandoned and betrayed him), Hammerstein (who’s replaced him), and their legions of admirers (who’ve forgotten him) hangs in the air as he holds court.
Perched on a seat that’s barely high enough to let him set his elbows on the bar, Hawke’s Lorenz is a fount of opinions, ranging from his negative appraisal of Oklahoma! (“A 14-karat hit and a 14-karat piece of shit”) to his glowing assessment of himself, invoking none other than Shakespeare in his description of his own work—except, that is, for the title song, which he doesn’t much like.
When Eddie expresses polite surprise at Lorenz’s interest in Elizabeth due to assumptions about his homosexuality, the songwriter pronounces himself “omnisexual,” arguing that to write for everyone means having everyone, figuratively (and maybe literally), inside him. His back-and-forths with the bartender are some of the proceedings’ highlights, although there are pleasures around every conversational corner, including a sly bit in which Lorenz inadvertently provides White with the inspiration for one of his most famous novels.
Lorenz loves himself to no end and yet he also adores art, which he believes, at its finest, reaches a crescendo that’s akin to “levitation.” While the music vet fears Rodgers no longer trusts him to ascend such heights, Hawke’s performance certainly does, exuding grandiloquent verve that’s laced with anger, hurt, fear, and despair.
Admirable and pitiable, horny and depressed, and charming and crass—among other things, he has a fondness for profanities and dirty talk—Lorenz is a 140-proof blend of the high and the low, and the actor evokes the links between his external brashness and internal suffering with masterful flair. Even in a cinematic relationship that’s spanned three decades and eight collaborations (counting this one), it’s just about as good as Hawke has ever been in a Linklater film.
Once Rodgers, Hammerstein, and their hangers-on appear, Blue Moon becomes a far more uncomfortable character study.
Lorenz’s failings are bluntly addressed by his former partner, who wants to reteam on an updated version of A Connecticut Yankee, and his fanciful dreams of romance are shot down by Elizabeth, albeit in a lengthy coat room chat that’s as steamy as it is woeful.
Scott is excellent as Rodgers, whose affection for Lorenz is at war with his frustration and fury over the man’s boozy unreliability, and Qualley is at once alluring and subtly aloof as Elizabeth, a young woman whose relationship with the doting Lorenz is complicated by the different versions of love they feel for each other. It’s Hawke, however, who’s the film’s magnificent MC, radiating intelligence and agony with dramatic elegance.
The longing for something that can’t be reclaimed (or is not to be) courses throughout Blue Moon, and the film’s wistfulness extends to old New York and its most charismatic denizens.
Setting his action exclusively in Sardi’s, Linklater doesn’t shy away from his material’s theatricality, but he expresses that which remains unspoken through canny camerawork and framing that highlights Lorenz’s isolation and smallness. In the few full-bodied shots of the actor, the director’s miniaturization of Hawke via shrewd camera trickery is mildly awkward. Otherwise, though, the film is handsome, silky, and inviting, balancing its nostalgia for its time, place, and people with razor-sharp wit.
Written with mouthfuls of incisive and resonant dialogue by Robert Kaplow, and beautifully shot and edited by Shane F. Kelly and Sandra Adair, respectively, Blue Moon is a love letter that’s decorated with as many tears as kisses, and it shares with its protagonist a passion for words, music, and art.
Most of all, it’s a showcase for its lead, whose vibrant and heart-rending turn captures the conflicting aspects of Lorenz without ever devolving into monotonous hero worship, censure, or—worst of all—caricature. Hawke has been great for so long that, at times, it feels as if he’s somewhat taken for granted. If that’s so, his tour-de-force here is a reminder that few are more adventurous, agile, or exceptional.
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