Stream It or Skip It?

This week on Linklater’s Long Nights with Ethan Hawke Theatre is Blue Moon (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a real-time, single-setting not-really-a-biopic dramatizing a lousy night in the life of songwriter Lorenz Hart. Now, hands up if you believe Hawke is way overdue for an Oscar: If your mitt stays down, then you obviously haven’t seen Boyhood or First Reformed, the latter of which rather criminally didn’t earn the actor a nomination. Blue Moon, his ninth (!) time working with director Richard Linklater, might be his best shot at glory, because he owns the movie top-to-bottom, front-to-back, playing a very funny, but very tragic man at a pivotal point in his life. 

BLUE MOON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: We open with Hart’s death, in a New York City alleyway during a miserable downpour. Then we jump back seven months to a time that offers significant insight into how he got to that sad, pathetic end. It’s March 31, 1943, the opening night of Oklahoma! on Broadway, a play he didn’t write. Turned it down, actually. That’s different, since the previous couple decades had found him penning the words to Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) tunes, the duo crafting hit after hit, from “The Lady is a Tramp” to “My Funny Valentine” to, of course, “Blue Moon.” Rodgers wrote Oklahoma! with Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and you know and I know and we all know that timeless crowdpleaser was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one defined by its lucrative creative output.

“Larry” Hart snorts and walks out of Oklahoma! before it’s over. He deems it cheesy, pandering pap, and maybe he has a point, but also, maybe he’s just bitter. Larry makes his way to Sardi’s Restaurant, where the afterparty will begin, and starts talking the ears off the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), while enlisted man Morty (Jonah Lees) plays the piano in the lounge. Larry has OPINIONS. About Casablanca and music and, especially, punctuation. “Oklahoma exclamation point,” he sneers in reference to his former partner’s pending smash hit. “It’s a 14-carat hit and a 14-carat piece of shit,” he quips. He’s witty. He’s funny. He’s angry. He’s sad. He’s randy. He’s nasty. And he’s sober. For now. And not for long. That’s been a problem. Eddie knows it, and fights Larry, but his job is not to make good decisions for people bent on making bad decisions. Self-destructive decisions. Eddie just listens, and laughs, and shakes his head, and pours the bourbon.

Larry continues to hold court at the end of the bar. He’s in love, he shares. With Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old Yale student. Sure, she’s less than half his age. But isn’t Larry gay? Larry laughs. “I’m drunk with beauty wherever I find it” is how he’ll eventually describe it, to Margaret herself. But that’s near the end of the film. He’s been going on for 35 minutes of the run time and finally the celebratory party arrives at Sardi’s. Larry’s conversations with Dick Rodgers are fraught with nostalgia and resentment and jealousy; they talk about how they’ll work together again, gussying up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and they talk about how frustrated Dick was when Larry was drunk and late and missing and lacking structure and dependability. Dick is wise enough to sense the contempt beneath Larry’s praise of Oklahoma!, although come to think of it, it doesn’t take wisdom as much as it takes basic consciousness. Larry seems to be gambling that his jealousy and resentment and need need need to drink that liquor might be assuaged or even solved by his lovelorn confession to Elizabeth. But all we can see is a trainwreck in slow motion. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Me and Orson Welles is another Linklater showbiz period piece, set in Old New York, on Broadway, just like Blue Moon. (Both are terrific, but ultimately second-tier Linklater.)

Performance Worth Watching: Hawke’s work here is absolutely acrobatic, conveying a dozen conflicting emotions in single line-readings, spinning plate after plate after plate – desperation, charismatic magnetism, lust, intellectualism, it goes on – for the whole of these 100 minutes. 

Sex And Skin: Just some randy talk.

Our Take: Blue Moon is about Larry Hart’s need for alcohol and need for love and need for an audience, all of which is here at Sardi’s on this night that’s miserable for him and, well, no one else in the picture. The alcohol will always be there. The love won’t. And the audience? It’s fading. Three, maybe four people will entertain his potent piece-of-workness, and a couple of them drop off as we watch the film. Everyone else has had enough, even Rodgers, who Scott depicts as conflicted between his love and respect for his former partner, and his threadbare patience for Larry’s fatally flawed antics. Larry has worn most everybody out, none more than the man he worked with for 20 years.

I personally have little interest in backstage Broadway – those who do will devour Blue Moon whole – but I do love a wily performance, especially by Hawke, whose creative renaissance dates back more than a decade at this point. His robust take on Hart is vulgar and hilarious, the man spewing his psychology all over the bar, cornering people who aren’t quite sure if they should admire or pity him. 

Pretty much every word of this razor-sharp dialogue – by screenwriter Robert Kaplow, basing it on Hart and Weinland’s letters; he also wrote the book that Me and Orson Welles is based on – is loaded to the hilt as this fading bigshot with small man syndrome bubbles over with toxicity and desperation. Linklater’s generous with the forced perspective to make Hawke fit Hart’s five-foot-nothing stature, and amusingly, Qualley’s 5’8” seems two feet taller, and her allure that much brighter – of course Larry’s in love with her, because who wouldn’g be? Hart is objectively obnoxious, but the trick is rendering him sympathetic, and Hawke deftly avoids being loathsome, instead plying the character with depression stemming from his addictions, his status and the state of his sexuality. 

Linklater, of course, is a master at capturing the profundity of time and the silent tragedy of its passage, and therefore unfolds significant drama in about 90 real-time minutes. But it’s never contrived or artificially compressed; we immediately comprehend how profound this evening is for Hart, the turning point from a lucrative creative partnership and hope for a new love to forlorn loneliness. It’s a story of alcoholism and depression, under a dimming spotlight. When the bulb goes dark its subject does too, and Hawke makes sure we intently feel that inevitability.

Our Call: What a brilliant performance, perhaps Hawke’s best yet. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.