© Sony Picture Classics
Ethan Hawke and Patrick Kennedy in Blue Moon (2025)
Ethan Hawke and Patrick Kennedy in Blue Moon (2025)
Perhaps the most deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination this year goes to Ethan Hawke for Blue Moon. He disappears into his role as Lorenz Hart, the great pre-war Broadway lyricist. With his receding comb-over, louche demeanor and bent posture, Hawke is almost unrecognizable. At moments he channels the fey disdain of John Malkovich; mostly, he conjures his own, entirely believable portrait of a troubled man whose fortunes were ebbing along with his talent.
The irritated Hart slips out of the 1943 Broadway opening of Oklahoma! and heads for his favorite watering hole, Sardi’s. Hart is bitchy tonight! Oklahoma! was written by his ex-long-term collaborator, Richard Rodgers, with a new collaborator, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. At the bar, Hart grouses that Rodgers’ new musical is “cornpone Americana,” adding, “Any title that feels the need for an exclamation point, you need to stay away from.” Rodgers and Hart are credited with pointing Broadway away from Old World Viennese operetta toward a distinctly contemporary, urbane America. Their songbook includes standards such as “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched” and “Blue Moon.” Rodgers’ best melodies levitated with Hart’s best words, transmuting Manhattan vernacular into poetry.
Did Hart actually condemn Oklahoma! as “nostalgic for a world that never existed”? Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, also nominated for an Oscar this season, was inspired by letters Elizabeth Weiland (played here by Margaret Qualley) wrote to Hart. Maybe Hart really confided that insight to her? Hart was in love with Weiland, an Ivy League student half his age with ties to New York theater, despite his gay reputation among the cognoscenti. “I’m ambisexual,” he explains to Sardi’s friendly bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale). He adds that as a writer, he needs to contain (echoing Walt Whitman) “the whole chorus of the world.”
Hart notices that his picture is missing from Sardi’s wall of celebrities, another measure of loss. This calls for another drink. Kaplow creates a low-key, reflective backdrop to Hart’s bitter near-monologues with a GI pianist who plays the popular numbers of the past three decades, including a few Hart helped write. Kaplow has Hart exchange wordplay with E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), one of the era’s foremost essayists. The verbal foreplay occurs before the expected arrival of the Oklahoma! post-premiere party and the inevitable encounter with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney). Shamefaced and almost groveling, Hart lies, telling his ex-partner and his replacement how much he loved the show.
Rodgers is depicted as businesslike, civil but less than warm. The soft spot in his heart for the friend who accompanied him to stardom loses to a hard-headed appraisal of Hart as an irresponsible, self-defeating alcoholic. Hart buttonholes Rodgers with his plan for a musical satire, Marco Polo. Rodgers doesn’t think Americans want satire and inches away with promises for a revised version of their first hit, A Connecticut Yankee. (Good as his word, Rodgers wrote several new songs with Hart for the revival, their final collaboration before Hart’s death).
The witty but sad story is directed by Hawke’s frequent collaborator, Richard Linklater, with whom he made Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Waking Life, The Newton Boys and other films. Set almost entirely in a single night at Sardi’s, Blue Moon could easily be translated into a stage production, an American tragedy along the lines of a playwright who came to the fore shortly after Hart’s death, Arthur Miller. Death of a Songwriter instead of Death of a Salesman?
