Hart of the World
By Michael Koresky
Blue Moon
Dir. Richard Linklater, U.S./Ireland, Sony Pictures Classics
In 1951, Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the foreword to The Rodgers & Hart Song Book, a compendium of sheet music that remains the definitive collection of works by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart. Featuring all the expected timeless standards (“My Funny Valentine,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Bewitched”) as well as some tunes we’d perhaps like to forget (“Give It Back to the Indians”), it’s a rich catalogue from an era that, even at the time of publishing, had already passed. Hammerstein’s words seem a gesture of magnanimity, paying tribute to work that came before him and to which he would probably always be compared. Yet he’s also drawing a historical line in the sand. He opens by revealing that he met Hart (whom he and most acquaintances called “Larry”) before Rodgers did, when the two performed in a Columbia Varsity Show, Larry dressed as Mary Pickford. “The blonde curly wig didn’t go very well with his thick black eyebrows,” wrote Hammerstein, who revels in the mildly demeaning memory of Larry as he “skipped and bounced around the stage like an electrified gnome.” He later praises Larry for his “humor and spryness,” but saves most of his encomiums for Rodgers’s musical prowess, which he compares, positively, to “neat rows of tenderly grown flowers on well-kept lawns.”
Hammerstein’s perfunctory nod to Hart’s genius is somewhat mitigated by Rodgers’s own subsequent introduction, which acknowledges that “Mr. Hart’s composer would have to be highly aware of the phonetic subtleties and semantic overtones in these lyrics” and celebrates his “interior rhymes, feminine rhymes, triple rhymes, false rhymes.” Nevertheless, the overall tone of the essay is one of bemused reflection rather than genuflection. Hart, an alcoholic who had died in 1943 at age 48 from pneumonia following a drinking binge, was already a memento. Rodgers & Hart had been supplanted by Rodgers & Hammerstein for almost a decade. The latter pair’s Broadway musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King & I had entered the vernacular of mainstream American culture. The former duo’s songs, however many of them were still instantly recognizable, were quickly becoming pre-World War II relics.
Richard Linklater’s new film Blue Moon positions itself at the precise moment that Hart and Rodgers’s increasingly fragile partnership had fractured. Over the course of one night at legendary Broadway watering hole Sardi’s, Hart (a mesmerizing, fully immersed Ethan Hawke) both comes to terms with and pushes against the encroaching borders of his new irrelevance. It’s a rain-soaked March evening in 1943, and Oklahoma!, the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein, is premiering up the street to the kind of ecstatic response that launches epochs. Grumbling and lousy with acidic quips, the lyricist, already feeling cast out of his long-standing partner’s inner circle, knows his time is up. In deciding to tell this particular story, set within a slice of time as thin as a piano wire, Linklater has created a nimble portrayal of the experience of disillusionment. Blue Moon is niche in its historical reference points and determinedly off-trend (quite the opposite of, say, a biopic of a hallowed rock star dealing with the oppression of imminent superstardom), but like the greatest art reveals its emotional complexities and unresolved, universal truths nearly every second of its run time.
With its breathless, alert script by Robert Kaplow (who wrote Linklater’s previous foray into anecdotal theater history, Me and Orson Welles), Blue Moon manages to keep expanding and contracting from its central dramatic concern, using the breakdown of this particular creative partnership to tease out age-old paradoxes between art and commerce, hope and despair, commitment and compromise. As played by Hawke, Lorenz “Larry” Hart is a showy, exhilarating avatar for such irreconcilable conundrums, an unflaggingly acerbic, unashamedly bisexual five-footer who inhabits a queer nether space. Larry is no withering sad-sack boozer—his take-no-prisoners personality is so outsized that he practically swans around the place. Blue Moon lives firmly within the tradition of the all-nighter bar hangout, the perfect subgenre for its director’s talky brand of midnight-oil philosophizing. Larry keeps referring to a big party he’s throwing back at his place later that night, though one begins to suspect that there might be no such thing, and that he’s likely staying put, right here on the stool that’s a smidge too high for him to reach comfortably.
While Blue Moon’s loquaciousness and circumscribed temporal boundaries both make it feel distinctly Linklaterian, the film, with its mobile camera, drifting through the soft lamplit glow of a once-vibrant bar (which is today no longer as central to theater culture as it once was), also put me in the mindset of the films of John Huston, both the barfly masterpiece Fat City and his James Joyce one-nighter, The Dead. That latter film, one of the great final works in any director’s oeuvre, likewise moves from talkative characters musing on earthbound pleasures to dwelling on the inchoate, or, “ineffable,” to use a word that comes up a lot in Blue Moon’s script. The ineffability of beauty, of art, of love, of forward motion, of space—Hart’s story becomes an abundant vessel for all of it. He’s a man of cerebral dynamism and physical limitation starting to realize, even embrace, the dying of the light all around him, made all the more pressing and poignant that his own slow death is occurring in the midst of a world war.
Hawke might not have been anyone’s first choice for this diminutive songwriter with a paunch, hobbled gait and insistent comb-over—and the film devises at-times transparent methods for emphasizing his small stature—but the actor captivates from the get-go, expanding upon the neurotic chatterbox template he’s set in other Linklater films (Jesse in the Before trilogy, divorced Mason Sr. in Boyhood, the rapid-fire drug dealer Vince in Tape) so that more vulnerability seeps through the cracks of his intellectual armor. Introduced croaking out the lyrics of Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s masochistic chestnut “Everything Happens to Me” while falling into a gutter puddle, Hawke’s Hart definitively leaves behind the more cherubic aspects of the actor’s previous work. Whether discoursing on the homoerotic bond of Bogart and Claude Rains in Casablanca; clasping his hands and quivering with admiration over the beautiful amber of an untouched bourbon shot; or lambasting Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! lyrics, especially “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” the incongruous imagery of which he finds idiotic, Larry is all bitter, frayed nerves, brilliantly inhabited with complicated, performative self-awareness at every turn. He’s always externalized—seemingly on the attack, both at himself and everyone else—while maintaining an air of mysterious privacy, the extrovert who’s emotionally inaccessible.
His ragged honesty extends to the complicated ways he surfaces his own “ineffable” sexuality, considering himself ambisexual (or, in artistic terms, omnisexual, as to be a writer, “the whole chorus of the world is already inside you”), rather than the more stigmatic homosexual. “A half-erect penis is a promise; is it going or is it coming?” Larry delights unabashedly. Though long known to have been gay, Hart is fashioned by Kaplow as doggedly pursuing the affections of a 20-year-old Yale student named Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). Not much is known about Weiland other than from letters the screenwriter uncovered in his research on Hart. A poet with whom he shared an affectionate, sexless overnight encounter, and with whom he claims he’d like to consummate a relationship before this night is through, Weiland is “beyond sex,” as Larry confides to patient bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale). His “irrational adoration” of this young beauty comes to feel more like an aesthete’s dream than a true sexual obsession, and it’s most likely he’s begun hanging his hopes on the promise of a relationship with her as a bulwark against the specter of loneliness. When Weiland shows up at Sardi’s, she’s clearly more interested in palling around with Larry (and getting introduced to Rodgers) than in seeking him out as a romantic partner. Whether or not this phantom relationship, largely a fictional supposition of Kaplow’s, reflects any historical reality, the tentative and delicate dance it creates between Larry and Elizabeth—and Hawke and Qualley—lends a touching dramatic shape to the film’s back half.
Qualley’s Weiland is afforded her own extended monologue—around a failed sexual encounter with a college jock on her recent birthday—but the rest of the film’s characters are largely sounding boards for Larry’s thrusts, parries, and delusions. In addition to Cannavale’s empathetic everyguy Eddie, there’s E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), squirreled away in the corner with a notepad bemoaning his own imminent career transition from New Yorker essayist to children’s author; the evening’s precocious pianist and soldier-on-leave Mort Rifkin (Jonah Lees); and, of course, Dick Rodgers himself (Andrew Scott), who arrives at the film’s midpoint, showered in accolades, aglow in the knowledge that his instant hit has changed Broadway musicals forever.
Rigorously reserved, the tuxedoed Scott strikes a breathtaking contrast to Hawke. He’s smooth and polite and notably untortured; you can tell instantly that all his melodies resolve perfectly. If Dick’s music indeed consists of “neat rows of tenderly grown flowers on well-kept lawns,” then the sweating Larry is an out-of-control lawnmower, running roughshod over such perfections. While Dick tries to bask in his success, Larry cannot help but trap him in his rapid-fire pitch of a new idea, a satirical Marco Polo travelogue musical that’s entirely old-fashioned and aggressively irreverent: everything that Rodgers would move away from as he leaned into the serious dramatic middlebrow with Hammerstein. Though insisting they’ll collaborate soon on a revival of their 1927 musical A Connecticut Yankee, Dick is, despite his bemused smile, visibly desperate to wriggle out of their conversation. Tired of Larry’s alcoholism and unreliability, Dick would likely have broken with him for Oscar’s greener pastures even if his longtime partner hadn’t died later that year.
In their brief but electrifying scenes together, Kaplow seems to pit Rodgers and Hart against one another as warring cultural avatars. When Hart accuses Oklahoma! of pandering to its wartime audience, of indulging in a nostalgia for a “world that never existed,” one can easily apply his standards to any argument, of any era, between the defenders of art and commerce. “Are 1600 people wrong?” Rodgers flings back, the thunderous applause from the St. James Theatre still echoing in his ears. Though Rodgers wrote in 1951, “I think I am quite safe in saying that Larry and I never had a single personal argument with each other,” these scenes get the core of the film. Whether or not one truly believes that Rodgers’s transition from the airy erudition of Hart to the thudding literality of Hammerstein marks a cultural demarcation point, the battle for uncompromising art was ever thus.
Blue Moon, in this way, becomes especially resonant when put in dialogue with Linklater’s other film from 2025, Nouvelle Vague, which jumps with delighted feet first into the effervescent boiler room creativity of the French New Wave. That film’s Jean-Luc Godard and this film’s Lorenz Hart are mirror-image imps, one bursting with promise at the sun-dappled beginning of his career, one closing in on himself at the rain-drenched end. Pairing these two artists’ journeys, Linklater, a sprightly 65, is continuing to investigate the artistic impulse—a thread in his work all the way back to Slacker—which strikes me as immeasurably moving, especially now when so much of our popular art is so anonymously churned out by committee, sculpted for our well-kept lawns.