Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon”, a snapshot from the life of one of America’s most prolific songwriters, Lorenz Hart, is a heartbreaking reminder that the greatest, even the most joyful, of art is often birthed from the most foundational of pain; and perhaps that is for the best.
One half of the songwriting pair Rogers and Hart, alongside his longtime partner Richard Rodgers, Hart was prolific in the early twentieth century, widely regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, penning classics like “My Funny Valentine” and the titular “Blue Moon”. Yet still, he ultimately died after being found pneumonic in a drunken stupor alone on the street, less than a year after the events of his film. Hart, as portrayed with masterful yearning by Ethan Hawke, is an oblong creature in a symmetrical world, a man of short stature with a titanic alcohol problem and the damnded soul of a romantic. We meet him seething as he suffers through the rousing final number of “Oklahoma!” on its opening night, the first production Rodgers (Andrew Scott) wrote for with his new songwriting partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. Assured of the production’s commercial success, yet vehemently opposed to its wax paper nostalgia, Hart leaves the premiere early and settles at the bar where the afterparty will later take place to begin holding court among the patrons and staff with his patented brand of braggadocious wit while not so subtly licking his wounds. “Oklahoma! With an exclamation point, no less,” expounds Hart, “Fact – any title that feels the need for an exclamation point, you want to steer clear of.” (Fans of Linklater’s work will enjoy this self-reflexive dig at perhaps my favorite of his films, the 1980s set college baseball hangout film, “Everybody Wants Some!!”) To ask him, Hart couldn’t care less about any songwriting that would stoop to be so treacly and boorish as “surreys with a fringe on top” or “corn as high as an elephant’s eye” because he, as he will eagerly espouse to anyone who bothers to listen, is in love, and his soul is alight. The woman in question, his twenty-year-old college-aged mentee Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), will soon be arriving with the after-party and, to hear Hart tell it, his life begins and ends with her; despite the obvious reality that his affections are pitifully one-sided. Elizabeth adores Hart, but “not in that way”, a phrase the film accurately highlights as one of the most tragic in the English language. However, love unrequited does not diminish its potency for being hoarded by a single party. Truly, it more likely enhances its parasitic grip on the lone pining soul cursed to carry, and perhaps drown, beneath the heft of affection meant for two. Hart is treading water at best, but in that doomed endeavor, Linklater has pinpointed the smoldering core that made Hart such a seismic force in American songwriting. The ache of love longed and lost, a conundrum that stalked the seemingly bisexual Hart for his entire life, was the honest humanness that reached out through his words and touched millions. His imperfection, his overcompensation, his boorish solipsisms, and desire for what could never be his; that is the stuff lasting art is made of, art that is about something. It’s powerful stuff, to create from the splintered fragments of the life one wished could have been theirs. It’s as apt to create as it is to destroy. In the case of Lorenz Hart, it seems to have accomplished both.
Richard Linklater is undoubtedly one of the great American filmmakers, himself a prolific chronicler of the finer points of human experience in both lush, idiosyncratic films like “The Before Trilogy” and bombastic crowd-pleasing romps like “School of Rock”. In 2025 alone, Linklater released two films focused on the lives of artists that he clearly admires: the other being “Nouvelle Vague”, a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at Jean Luc Godard’s production of his seminal French New Wave film “Breathless”. Godard and Hart could not be less comparable; one is a helpless romantic trying and failing to manifest the beauty he feels into reality while being consistently sidelined by addiction, while the other presents as a high-minded, self-centered, erudite egomaniac whose poor treatment of his collaborators is only minutely forgiven by the historical importance of the film crafted from the chaos. The films themselves stand in equally stark contrast; “Blue Moon” a simple exercise in actors performing deeply felt monologues and interpersonal interactions that seemingly scratch at the edges of feelings we all experience and rarely touch upon, while “Nouvelle Vague” stands at arm’s length, painting Goddard as a savant beyond reproach, a black sunglasses wearing Svengali who felt little beyond the unquenchable desire to make art that would impress his intellecual peers. There are many who enjoyed ‘Nouvelle Vague”, though I was not one of them. Perhaps I am a bit tired of biographical films which portray the actions of “great men” as justified for the after effects of their work. Lorenz Hart does not see himself as great and is, in fact, quick with a joke or a jab at his own expense, as if eager to bemoan the flaws in his most memorable work, especially “Blue Moon”. That he is brilliant is without question; everyone at the “Oklahoma!” afterparty knows that Hart is a singular genius, and frankly tells him so. We are left then watching a man who has attained the status of respect he always wanted, to stand shoulder to shoulder artistically with his peers, yet cannot get out of his own way in sustaining it. He is a principled man who sees songwriting as a tool for satire, who views the schmaltzy and overly sentimental “Oklahoma!” as a suppressant to the intellect of culture, and who also, when Rodgers is present, will slip into a restrained cordiality and rave about its unambiguous artistic merit. Yet, even when getting along to go along, Hart can only sustain the facade for so long before his baser, honest impulses rage forth like the many heads of a self-destructive hydra that all happen to wear his face. Hart is human, while Godard is robotic; the artist versus the craftsman, perhaps a heretical sentiment considering the importance of the French New Wave on the world stage, but what is art without feeling? As an exercise, “Nouvelle Vague” acts as an ambitious retelling of reality without fluff or frills, in the French tradition. There’s a Linklater film for everyone, from “Slacker” to “Hit Man”. I prefer Linklater when he digs a little deeper into something more human. I prefer “Blue Moon”.
“Blue Moon”, from a screenplay by Robert Kaplow, who previously collaborated with Linklater by adapting his novel “Me and Orson Welles”, is that special kind of film that could be staged as a play but would lose something in the evolution. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Hart is nothing less than a real-time evisceration of one man’s sense of self as he is unknowingly eulogized in real time by his artistic peers, his fellow barflies, and his current love. That he will die is known to the audience from the film’s opening frames, but it is the slow creep that spreads through Hawke as the film progresses, which tells us that perhaps Hart knows it too. This party could very well be his memorial, and he himself merely a ghost treading the boards of his own life one last time. “Blue Moon” leaves a melancholy, not unlike the song itself, the universal sadness of standing alone, without a dream in your heart or a love of your own. Whom amongst us hasn’t been there? Lorenz Hart may have himself died cold and alone, but his words are the stuff of forever. Thank God for that.
Give “Blue Moon” a spin and touch the beauty of one man’s tragic contradiction.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Blue Moon” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
