Blue Moon: Lovesick Blues

There is an apocryphal joke (Reader’s Digest) regarding Ernest Hemingway’s literary style of prose – his answer to any question would consist of “To Die. Alone. In the rain.” Such is the opening sequence of Blue Moon (2025), as the main character expires while softly vocalizing in stormy conditions. However, this moment of “singin’ in the rain” is not a rejuvenation of spirit but a physical collapse, one that plays so real because it indeed occurred, historically. With such a somber prologue, the film captures the mood of its subject, lovesick lyricist Lorenz Hart. Blue Moon triumphs as a portrait of an artist due to writer Robert Kaplow’s witty script and Ethan Hawke’s terrific performance as Hart.

Due to its dialogue-driven narrative and nearly single-location setting, Blue Moon feels like a theatrical production. This is appropriate as the historical figures of Hart and Richard Rodgers worked primarily in musical theater. But director Richard Linklater and his career-long editor Sandra Adair do not allow the film to become too “stagey” in its scenes. In the film’s setting of the famed New York restaurant Sardi’s on the opening night of Oklahoma!, Robert Kaplow pens a discourse on the intersection of life, literature, and love. It is a delightfully entertaining script due to its sincerity, even when its lead character critiques the famed musical’s content and success. Hart describes Oklahoma as “cornpone Americana” as he queries to his fellow restaurant patrons, “who wants inoffensive art?”

There is a smooth flow in Kaplow’s script as Hart discourses with everyone in the restaurant’s bar, to more private conversations including empathetic bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), wistful writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), and protégé Elizabeth Wieland (Margaret Qualley), whose actual correspondence with Hart inspired this script. This seamless conversation is an examination of love in all its words and musical notes, matching the legacy of Hart’s lyrical contribution to Rodgers’ music. After all, Hart is the writer of great lovesick lines belonging to the titular song, including “Without a dream in my heart.” 

As an authority of literature’s import, Hart respects the emotional sincerity found in the line “Nobody ever loved me that much,” from Casablanca (1942). In Kaplow’s presentation, Hart reveres others’ work just as much as he critiques. He will even provide false praise in the effort to secure further work with his partner Rodgers (Andrew Scott). He knows that Oklahoma! will be a smashing success; its eternal corniness will be “as high as an elephant’s eye.” Hart is desperate to continue his career, despite his obvious problems – he imbibes numerous whiskey shots as if he were drinking water.

Hart is a compelling figure for Kaplow to dramatize. He was a brilliant lyricist whose songs are still sung to this day; yet, his name is not synonymous with Rodgers despite their decades of work together. Author of the novella Me and Orson Welles (which was adapted as a film by Linklater), Kaplow understands tortured souls who desire for eternal expression and eternal recognition. In a fantastic metaphor for Hart’s own life, Kaplow writes about a trapped mouse that he encounters daily in his high-rise apartment. Rather than destroying it, Hart captures and escorts it back to a nearby park. For the mouse to continuously return to captivity suggests a “doomed hopefulness” in its safe voyage home. Kaplow’s sentiment perfectly describes Hart’s own predicament: yearning for career success and love in the face of failure.

 Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of the tormented Hart is spectacular, a significant highlight for a career that has reached its 40th year in the film business (beginning with Explorers in 1985). There must be a soulful kinship for Hawke in his portrayal, as he once portrayed jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in Born to be Blue (2015), an artist famous for his rendition of Hart’s song “My Funny Valentine.” The role must have been further compelling to Hawke, as the director of the excellent Blaze (2018) about singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, another tortured artist who never found success in his own lifetime, despite the respect of his peers.

Featuring a comb-over and affecting diminutive size, Hawke physically captures an artist that was overlooked in his own time and by history., Hawke’s portrayal of the closeted artist never veers into camp. Instead, it is imbued with sincerity. Here is an alcoholic who is also “drunk with beauty,” in all of its forms. One of those forms is in the person of Qualley’s Weiland, a Yale student who wishes for an introduction to Hart’s theater community. 

In one of the film’s many intimate moments of conversation, Hart finds himself ‘in the closet’ (or the restaurant’s cloak room, to be exact) with Weiland as they discuss her recent romantic tryst with a fellow male student. Hart’s delight in knowing such gossipy details reveals him to be a conversational voyeur. Throughout the film, Hart expresses his enduring love for Weiland, but confesses that he “hasn’t violated the Mann Act, or even the middle-aged man act” when it comes to his physical attraction to his protégé. How unfortunate for the lyricist who wrote the words “Without a love of my own.” 

In his ninth collaboration with director Richard Linklater (technically eleventh, as Linklater acted in a small role in Blaze and contributed thoughts in Hawke’s documentary The Last Movie Stars (2022), regarding Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward), Hawke is the perfect casting to portray Hart. To capture the sentimental Hart, who better than an actor that Linklater knows, trusts, and has conveyed such sensitivity throughout his career? For his leading performance, Hawke holds court just as Hart does in the restaurant’s bar, entertaining all with his witty comments.

While all of the performing actors are in supporting roles to Hawke’s Hart, who wouldn’t want to stay a little while longer, listening to sharp dialogue from a veteran actor? Take a seat at the bar and ask for your favorite drink.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!