For 40 years, Ethan Hawke has been carving out a distinct place in the American cinema, taking on a range of roles that have challenged him as well as expectations. With assorted accents, emotional registers and psychological states, he has played charmers, rogues, men of good conscience (and bad), young old souls and the perpetually boyish. Once the reigning slacker prince and Generation X icon as famous for the women in his life as for his work, he shook off the chains of It Boy celebrity to become an elusive ideal: a reliably interesting, stealthily great actor, and one with a striking commitment to his signature goatee.
Hawke has razored off his familiar chin hair to play the lyricist Lorenz Hart in the new movie “Blue Moon,” which opens Oct. 17. Written by Robert Kaplow and directed by Hawke’s longtime collaborator Richard Linklater, it is a portrait of desperation that largely takes place in Sardi’s restaurant during one fraught, talk-and-booze-filled night. Hart is barely holding it together. It’s March 31, 1943, and a new musical — a future classic of the Great American Songbook — composed by his longtime songwriting partner, Richard Rodgers (they did “Pal Joey” together), is having its Broadway premiere. The problem is that Hart didn’t write the lyrics for “Oklahoma!”; Oscar Hammerstein II did.
Hawke has undergone a stark transformation for the role, with a tragic combover clinging to his shaved head and his height obscured to mime Hart’s five-foot stature. It’s the kind of makeover that stirs up awards chatter, though Hawke’s performance isn’t Oscar-grubbing bait. There’s tragedy here but Hart is complicated, and Hawke plays him with nasty bite as well as verbal flourish. Hart uses words to dazzle, shock and cut, but his cramped physicality suggests an alarming desiccation. Hart looks like he’s collapsing inward, like a rotting peach. “Blue Moon” is about loss but, like other Hawke-Linklater movies, it is also about time.
MOVIES FREEZE TIME, turning the evanescent into the eternal. A fascinating dimension comes into play, though, when you watch an actor like Elizabeth Taylor, say, grow up onscreen, because time is simultaneously frozen and flowing. Yet it’s one thing to watch old movies with now-dead stars and an entirely different matter when you watch a working actor like Hawke go from childhood to young adulthood and middle age in your own time. You’re in the flow together. That temporal passage is very much at play in the triptych that Linklater made with Hawke and Julie Delpy beginning with “Before Sunrise” (1995), when all three were in their 20s and 30s, and continuing with “Before Sunset” (2004) and “Before Midnight” (2013).
Hawke was just 14 when his first film, “Explorers” (1985), was released. A leaden fantasy directed by Joe Dante about kids, dreams and outer space, it didn’t connect with moviegoers, but Hawke earned warm notices. (The Times review called him “a poster-perfect leading boy.”) Born in Texas, he and his family were living in New Jersey when it opened. A local paper ran a profile of him, a “regular kid,” who spent summers riding his bike and watching videos with friends. Football and tennis were part of this boy’s life, too. But the kid had also started taking acting lessons, and that summer he was playing Lysimachus in a production of Shakespeare’s “Pericles.” Hawke told the reporter, “I just want to be respected as an actor.”
The plaintive sincerity of that statement is charming, and perhaps also helps explain the breadth of Hawke’s subsequent career, which includes stage and TV along with a lengthy filmography. He has directed movies and written novels. He directed the music video for Lisa Loeb’s 1994 hit “Stay (I Missed You”); he has a cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Fortnight.” All these pursuits suggest a searching, restless spirit and a tireless work ethic; Hawke clearly doesn’t take much time off. He also likes collaborating with some directors repeatedly: He’s appeared in nine Linklater movies, three directed by Michael Almereyda and four by Antoine Fuqua, who cast Hawke as an upright cop opposite Denzel Washington’s corrupt one in “Training Day” (2001).
Washington’s performance as a swaggering, murderous Los Angeles detective named Alonzo dominates “Training Day,” but the film wouldn’t work without Hawke’s contrapuntal turn as the younger cop. Hawke’s watchful, comparatively recessive performance gives Washington room to dominate and it also gives the viewer an empathetic focal point. A similar dynamic plays out in Sidney Lumet’s 2007 crime drama “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” about two thieving brothers. It’s easy to be dazzled by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the older, shockingly venal sibling, but it’s Hawke’s sweaty, desperately vulnerable performance as the younger sibling that offers you an emotional tether.
SOME ACTORS WIN YOU OVER at once with the obvious force of their gifts, while others take time or just need certain roles and the right filmmakers to persuade you. Still other performers just work your nerves like a rubber band snapping against your skin, which describes Hawke’s effect on me earlier in his career and mine. I didn’t like either him or his breakthrough film, “Dead Poets Society” (1989), in which he played a teenager so sensitive I couldn’t bear a single moment of his tremulousness. And I couldn’t stand him in “Reality Bites” (1994), in which he played a Gen-X cliché (guitar, existential anthology, caustic comebacks and, yes, a goatee) who wins Winona Ryder’s affections mostly, it seems, because he’s hotter than Ben Stiller’s uncool rival.
I think my dislike for “Reality Bites” predisposed me against Hawke, which carried over into “Before Sunrise.” I didn’t believe its story, for one, which finds Delpy’s Celine getting off a train in Vienna to walk and talk with Hawke’s Jesse. A loquacious pretty boy whose ostensible charms felt wholly in service to his desire to get laid, Jesse irked me, as did what I saw as his untroubled self-regard. Everything seemed too easy for this guy. I wrote a cranky review for LA Weekly and kept finding fault with Hawke, though I found something to like about him in Linklater’s film “The Newton Boys” (1998), about bank-robbing brothers. Years later, I discovered that at least one reader had noticed my Hawke Problem.
In 2015, at the awards dinner for the New York Film Critics Circle, Hawke introduced Linklater, who received several prizes that night for his intimate epic, “Boyhood.” (Hawke plays the dad.) “‘Richard Linklater seems to achieve the impossible: He makes Ethan Hawke bearable,’” Hawke told the crowd, accurately quoting the damning-with-faint-praise line from my “Newton Boy” review.
That makes me laugh, though I loved “Boyhood” and had long warmed to Hawke, including for his performance in Almereyda’s modern adaptation of “Hamlet” (2000). In one of the director’s most startling interpretive moves, he has Hamlet deliver his “to be or not to be” soliloquy while wandering through a Blockbuster video store. It’s hard to know how to react at first, particularly because Hamlet is wearing a Peruvian-style wool cap that sits on his head like a kick-me sign. It’s a freighted emblem for a guy who looks like an East Village poseur yet is reciting lines spoken by the likes of Laurence Olivier. There’s a self-reflexive sting here because surely some of the rentals are of legendary versions of the play (and this movie isn’t a blockbuster).
Throughout the movie, Almereyda uses Hawke’s vocal range and Hamlet’s inner and outer voices to express the character’s fragmented mind, including with soliloquies that are delivered in voice-over and aloud, including in a video that Hamlet has made of himself. When Hamlet asks in voice-over whether it is nobler to suffer or take up action while wandering the store it’s hard to take him seriously. Yet as Hamlet continues speaking — his sepulchral inner voice shifting to hushed spoken monologue — both his and the setup’s absurdity dissipate and Hawke’s intimate, precise and quietly moving delivery brings you closer to the character. You forget the hat; you’re in his head.
In an 2018 interview with Paul Schrader pegged to the release of his drama “First Reformed,” he described what made him believe that Hawke could play the lead, a minister suffering a crisis of faith. It’s a modestly scaled masterpiece about our fallen world, and Hawke is unshowy and haunting. Schrader had seen something in the actor that struck him: “You can see a number of lessons in his face that he doesn’t have to act,” he said. “Life has put them there.” It is also Hawke’s ability to articulate exacting interiority, both vocally and physically, that serves this role brilliantly. “Every time he felt the need to be likable and outgoing and casual and friendly,” Schrader said, he asked the actor to “take that impulse and turn it around and thrust it inside.”
It’s a startling, brutal figure of speech, but it also gets at Hawke’s gift for drawing you into his characters. He didn’t always have it, or maybe I just didn’t see it in his earlier work or simply didn’t like what I saw. I rarely change my mind about movies significantly, but actors aren’t forever locked in amber in the same way. They grow, they grow old, they change careers, become yesterday’s news only to be rediscovered and celebrated once more. They also mature and their gifts deepen, sometimes unexpectedly. Their smoothness takes on rough edges, their voices find new expressivity, their faces crease interestingly. And sometimes a promising newcomer becomes a cinematic stalwart, and one of his most unforgiving critics becomes one of his admirers.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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