Blue Moon: Ethan Hawke feels unstoppable in Richard Linklater’s loving Broadway biopic

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon portrays the long goodbye of a great American lyricist, Lorenz Hart, told through the filmmaker’s mastery of creative time frames and poignant reflection. As witty and alert as its fading subject, it takes place within a Manhattan bar on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the inescapable 1943 classic by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and notably not Hart, Rodgers’s former partner.

Ethan Hawke, somehow compressed to Hart’s five feet and crowned with a comb-over, pours unflagging energy into playing the writer of ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, ‘Manhattan’, and the earworm of the title ‘Blue Moon’. In the film’s extended first third, he is the genius at the end of the bar at Sardi’s restaurant in New York, regaling his tiny audience (bartender, pianist, and essayist E.B. White) with stories, snipes, romantic avowals, and writerly commentary on his loves and hates in song and screen. The inspired Hawke is always on, and the usual seamless imitation of the biopic is not the point of his brilliant capture of Hart’s virtuosity. 

Filming a sparkling script by Robert Kaplow (known for 2008’s Me and Orson Welles), Linklater works his wizardry with another single night’s articulate drama as he and Hawke did in Before Sunrise (1995). The scenario has three main setpieces: first, Hart at the bar hyping up his college-age obsession, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley); then the triumphant arrival of Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and his premiere party across the hall; and the closeted Hart’s enthused but chaste tête-à-tête with Elizabeth.  

A prologue has already recalled Hart’s final exit, dying at 48 after collapsing on the street, wrecked by alcoholism. Blue Moon turns the spotlight on Hart in his element one year earlier: talking himself up to a ‘Noo Yawk’ barkeep (Bobby Cannavale), periodically stopping short in a puddle of melancholic appreciation for, say, the Casablanca line “Nobody ever loved me that much.” He invites a delivery kid to a party at his place, rags on the bar’s G.I.-kid pianist (who angles for an introduction to Rodgers), and commiserates with soft-spoken E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). 

Despite mocking “Oklahoma exclamation point” as he calls it, Hart shifts into showbiz schmoozing when Rodgers glides in to await the newspaper reviews. The film likewise shifts neatly into a robust portrait of friendship and rivalry between these two giant talents: Hart eclipsed, Rodgers aware of his stature but gracious, and both fiercely opinionated about their art form. Rodgers (Scott bringing a gruff charm and rhythm reminiscent of Charles Grodin) is now joined with Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) but proposes a side project to Hart; Hart instead pitches a sprawling Marco Polo musical, a scabrous satire. Rodgers, unmoved, holds the line, persuasively asking, “What’s wrong with sentimental?” in an exchange heralding a groundswell in the modern musical. 

It’s important to note that Blue Moon does not require Broadway fandom (and the boy wonder, “Little Stevie,” who is Hammerstein’s protégé is a funny mini-curmudgeon even if you don’t recognise a baby Stephen Sondheim). The theatre-crowd milieu is efficiently sketched and evades the hokiness that plagues many hollow renditions of “old New York” (even allowing for the look-it’s-that-famous-photographer-Weegee aside). That bona fide feel is fully clinched when Hart’s idolised Elizabeth swans in, and the two abscond to a coatroom for her blow-by-blow recounting of her college fling.  

Elizabeth, a sharp aspirant to stage (in design and writing) and daughter of a theatre bigwig, dishes a tale of woe about some Yale cad. She loves her older pal but “not in that way,” and his pining seems to let him express his general torment. Linklater directs the sweetly bonded actors throughout with sensitivity for tone (not pitying Hart, who does that enough to himself), and her rush of words also brings us deeper into the time period, with confidences you feel you would hear only then and there in the room. The frisson of Linklater-style ruminations is in full effect, more intense than any fervid flashback. 

Hawke told one interviewer that Linklater’s direction was partly modelled on Rodgers and Hart songs: “heartbreaking then funny and silly then smart and then strange.” That’s a faithful description of the well-staged cinematic nuance of Blue Moon, going from Hart’s one-man-show energy at the often wide-shot bar, to the professional/personal hustle of the party, to the hushed behind-the-curtain heart-to-heart with Elizabeth. Rest in peace Rodgers and Hart, and long live Linklater and Hawke.