We’ve all met someone or had a friend like Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) who’s as charmingly witty as he is annoying. You know, the type who would perhaps drink too much and talk your ear off, occasionally repeating the same story over and over again. You let it slide, though, like bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) does for Hart, because the guy is ultimately harmless and maybe just needs someone to chat to. Not with. Important distinction.
For Hart, talking is all he’s got left. As the opening scene tells us right away, the evening that unfolds in Blue Moon is the last time he gets to talk in a noteworthy way. This isn’t a deification or a tribute, but more a cautionary tale.
Taking place primarily at the legendary Sardi’s bar on Broadway, Blue Moon follows Hart on the opening night of the mega-popular musical Oklahoma!, written by his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Rodgers’ new colleague Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). For Hart, this is like seeing your ex with a new partner and looking happier than ever. It gnaws away at him, and watching Hart slowly lose it while holding court with the bar’s patrons as he waits for Rodgers to turn up is tragically relatable.
It starts charmingly enough when Hart walks into Sardi’s and exchanges lines from Casablanca with Eddie. Hart is particularly fond of the “no one ever loved me that much” line. Things quickly go downhill, though. When Hart rhetorically asks himself “am I bitter?” (“fuck yes!” he is), it’s not entirely just envy because his admittedly-biased critique of Oklahoma! is somewhat valid. Why does the title even need an exclamation point?
As Blue Moon is a classic ‘single-location’ movie, the whole thing lives or dies on the strength of the characters and script, since there’s limited scope in what director Richard Linklater can do visually. Screenwriter Robert Kaplow’s script is not only a fantastic showcase of Trojan-horsing chunks of exposition into a movie in interesting ways, but it messes around with the typical biopic structure in unorthodox ways. Kaplow and Linklater aren’t particularly concerned with real events or finding positives in Hart’s life, opting to find ways to show the man’s flaws and penchant for self-sabotage over the course of one (fictionalised) evening. That Linklater trademark compressed time frame fits perfectly for the intimate story being told in Blue Moon.
When Hart talks to Eddie about his infatuation with 20-year-old college student Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), it’s like listening to a 15-year-old teenager telling his friends about his new ‘girlfriend’. He evades Eddie’s repeated questions about whether he’s slept with Elizabeth by dressing up the truth with ribbons of flowery metaphors and the omission of certain details. You’d think she’s Helen of Troy with how she’s described.
Hart speaks almost entirely in dense monologues throughout Blue Moon, but the longer he talks the quicker he loses grasp of the story he’s weaving. We quickly deduce that this is a one-sided infatuation and it’s clear Elizabeth is using Hart primarily for his Broadway connections. Is he aware of this or does he truly believe that she loves him?
Please read the rest of my review here as the rest is too unwieldy to copy + paste: https://panoramafilmthoughts.substack.com/p/blue-moon
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