I am a sucker for "talky" movies. Sit me down and let me watch actors banter back and forth with a witty and cerebral script and I'm in heaven. I know this isn't for everyone but it's my jam. Linklater is good at this sort of thing and Blue Moon, with its theatre lover-bait premise and its cinemaphile cast, is just the sort of film I like to lose myself in for a little while.
Set on the opening night of Richard Rogers' legendary smash hit Oklahoma!, Rogers' former writing partner, Lorenz Hart, spends the night at Sardis chatting with the bartender, a woman he is obsessed with, and the attendees of the premier's afterparty including his former colleague himself. We know they aren't going to write another show together and that Rogers is going on to work with his new collaborator to write South Pacific, The King and I, and the goddamned Sound of Music of all things. It is a beautiful moment of pathos and loss.
Hawke is Hart and he dissolves into the character in a way that is delightful. He is a talker and the film is mostly him speaking at muzzle velocity, covering over all his wounds and thankfully never having that dramatic breakdown moment one would expect if the film had gone more in the cliche direction. What we witness instead is a man acknowledging a world that has given him so much to squander and offering his own rational for his journey without blaming. He flounders a little but mostly holds himself together and it's a beautiful and complicated little dance he is doing. The film has a lovely sympathy for him without taking pity.
By being set almost all the action in a bar next to a piano, Blue Moon gets to be serenaded throughout with a beautiful piano medley of the standards, ending with the song Blue Moon itself, which the film posits is not Harts' favourite of his compositions. Yet it is clearly a thing of true beauty; he had written something timeless and gorgeous.
Blue Moon
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
Director: Richard Linklater
Writer: Robert Kaplow
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