REVIEW. BLUE MOON Illuminates the Banality of Broadway Genius.

Margaret Qualley (L) and Ethan Hawke (R) in Richard Linklater's Blue Moon.

On a dark and rainy night in November 1943, a drunken Lorenz "Larry" Hart (Ethan Hawke) stumbles down a NYC alley, incoherently mumbling song lyrics before collapsing on the street. As he lies alone shivering in the cold, a message appears on the screen, informing us that Hart died several days later from complications of pneumonia.

But was it just pneumonia, or did other demons contribute to Larry's demise? The story then takes us back seven months earlier, specifically, the night of March 31, 1943 and the Broadway premier of Oklahoma! On that night, a dejected Hart allegedly left his mother at the theater before the curtain fell, unhappy with Oklahoma!'s obvious triumph, but really upset about his lack of involvement in it. So where does the newly sober, disgruntled Hart go? He races to arrive early the musical's opening night celebration at Sardi's because he has other aspirations of his own for the night: a rendez-vous with a young woman named Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a Yale art design student twenty-seven years his junior, in the hope of winning her favor.

So there you have it: a middle-aged Broadway lyricist struggling with sobriety, teetering on career failure, who still lives with his mother, angry that a former songwriting partner is flourishing with another lyricist, but forever hopeful that a college student might mend his broken heart.

The stuff that dreams are made of? Unfortunately, no. All of this intriguing set-up is history "re-imagined," not retold. Screenwriter Robert Kaplow, a novelist and former teacher (Summit High School in New Jersey), has interwoven fact with fiction before, notably in Me and Orson Welles (the 2003 coming-of-age novel was made into a movie by - you guessed it - Blue Moon's director, Richard Linklater in 2009), and, more recently, The Watcher (Netflix series, 2022). The impetus/inspiration for Blue Moon appears to have been a set of letters Kaplow purchased from a bookseller, which contained copies of correspondence between Hart and a woman who signed the letters "Elizabeth Weiland." Whether Weiland is/was a real person, a pseudonym, or a compilation of several people, is unclear, though she is presented here as a singularly beautiful aspiring poet and theater student who has caught Hart's eye and captured his heart.

Kaplow has thus fabricated a night of self-reflection for the now temporarily sober Hart based on these letters. When he arrives at Sardi's with gifts in hand and a plan in mind to profess his love to his muse, Hart seems optimistic about the night ahead, although he can't quite shake the jealousy he feels witnessing songwriter partner Richard Rodgers's (Andrew Scott) impending success with another lyricist, one Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). As he bellies up to the bar and asks Eddie (Bobby Canavale) to pour him a shot so he can admire it and a club soda he can drink, we sense we're in for an extended monologue that is, alternately, witty and hearbreaking yet ultimately, filled with delusion and self-loathing. If you are not a keen student of the history of Broadway musicals and song lyrics, Kaplow's numerous musical references might leave you standing alone without a clue to what's he's ranting about.

Hart's disdain for Hammerstein's hamfisted lyrics (re: "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye") is clear and, at times, genuinely funny, as is his cynicism toward the cockeyed optimism that became the imprimatur of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. He longs to write musicals that are edgier, darker, and more complex. The idea of a successful musical whose male lead is a cowboy named Curly drives him up a wall, though his own lack of discipline, marked by a history of irresponsible behavior, make him a less than desirable songwriting partner. His repeated attempts to corner Rodgers (whom he snidely refers to as "Dick") at the after-party to present new musical ideas become increasingly desperate and pathetic.

Rodgers makes it clear he's already signed on for future projects with Hammerstein, and only seems interested in having Hart work with him on a revival of their musical, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, an offer we learn Hart does make good on, in what was the final project before his death. Rodgers has come to see Hart, not only as an unreliable collaborator, but as someone out of touch with American audiences.

With all this tension, professional jealousy and unrequited love hanging over the proceedings, you might think Blue Moon is as emotionally charged as the song title it honors. It is not. Instead we get lengthy, rambling diatribes from Hart, interrupted only by feeble conversations with other party goers and patrons at Sardi's. These random chats to which we are invited as unseen eavesdroppers feel awkward, like being privvy to information we don't need to know.

In particular, the final encounter between Larry and Elizabeth, on the floor of Sardi's coatroom, felt like TMI: with each detail Elizabeth earnestly describes about her unrequired love for a Yale stud named Cooper with whom she had sex four months earlier, she metaphorically kicks Larry in the stomach or, more appropriately, the groin. His face was a blur of creepy titilation and emotional heartbreak, and I wasn't sure if this scene was supposed to show effective character development or if it was just unsettling exploitation. If I want pruient surveillance, I'll rewatch Rear Window.

The inclusion of writer E.B. White as a casual observer seated in a corner of the bar is also wasted. It serves as an example of the kind of cheap historical conclusions we're expected to make with respect to Hart's influence on others. What might have been an engaging exchange of ideas between two men of words, instead becomes a trite series of comments about mundane things. When Hart regales White with a tale about his adventures with a mouse, whom he regularly catches in his apartment and feeds, only to return it to the park the following day, you can see the outcome a mile away. White askes him if he has a name for said mouse and Hart responds, "Stuart." As Hart walks away, we see White whip out a notepad to scribble down the name. Ugh.

NOTE: For those unfamiliar with E.B. White's children's books, Stuart Little (1945) was his first novel for younger readers. The title character is a boy whose size and features are like those of a mouse. The book, along with White's Charlotte's Web (1952), are today considered children's classics. But I'm hard-pressed to assume that Lorenz Hart provided White with the mouse's name.

A similarly cringeworthy exchange takes place when Hammerstein attempts to praise Hart for his lyrical style and mastery of word-smithing. Standing by is a young lad, a protégé of Hammerstein whose encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater is both astonishing and annoying. When the child belittles Hart's lyrics by comparing them to his own, Hammerstein hurries him away, whispering, "Not now, Stephen." It's Stephen Sondheim, of course, who later credited Hammerstein with taking him under his wing as a teen after Sondheim's parents divorced. Here, though, as with White, it's a clunky attempt to connect Hart's impact to someone on whom he probably had little to no direct influence.

Though I applaud director Richard Linklater for not whitewashing Hart's story, as other movies about composers of his generation (1945's Rhapsody in Blue about George Gershwin or 1948's Words an Music about Richard Rodgers) have done, I still can't recommend Blue Moon. Despite fine performances from Hawke and Scott (who won the Supporting Actor nod at the Berlin Film Festival this summer), as the estranged songwriters, the movie fails to develop any kind of real conflict, internal or otherwise, that makes for compelling drama.

The 5'10" Hawke does do a masterful job transforming into the 5'1" Hart without excessive make-up or camera tricks, but Hart's diminutiveness is really his pettiness toward others. He's smitten with his own limited talent and seems to be in a perpetual state of self-promotion on some level. We've all probably met someone like Hart, a perhaps once promising, but now mediocre professional who can't see his place in the pantheon of his craft. The more Hart talks, the more you just want him to shut up and take a long, hard look in the mirror, though Hart likely sees more clearly looking at the bottom of a shot glass.

Hawke was tagged early on as a possible Best Actor contender for the 2026 Oscars. It will be interesting to see how far the movie's limited release in theaters will carry into the upcoming awards season nominations. Ditto for Andrew Scott in the Supporting Actor category, as there are more and more candidates joining the race for Oscar gold.

Blue Moon is the ninth collaboration between Linklater and Hawke, whom I like to think of as the Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro of Gen X-er's. Scorsese and De Niro have made ten films together to date. With the Before trilogy (three companion movies: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight made between 1995-2013) and Boyhood (2014) the best of their film work, Blue Moon comes across as a good idea on paper, but one that never quite gels as an engaging film, no development of empathy for Hart as a misunderstood artist, a closeted homosexual, or a hopeless romantic. Movie nerds, champions of The Great American Songbook, and Linklater/Hawke fans (myself included) will enjoy it for its insider references, and will also likely comb the script and the performances for deeper meaning about the life and legacy of Lorenz Hart, but the truth is, there's not much here.

For me, as a historian, a missed dramatic arc centers around Rodgers request that Hart write four or five new songs for the revival of Connecticut Yankee. Though sobriety apparently eluded Hart in the final months of his life, he did complete the songs between the Oklahoma! after-party in March 1943 and Yankee's premier in November of that year. In fact, Hart - as depicted at the beginning of Blue Moon - would actually have been wandering around in a profoundly intoxicated state immediately after leaving the revival's opening night in despair.

It is that moment that would have led to his death a few days later, but Linklater and Kaplow make no attempt to close that loop with their mostly imagined narrative the final months of Hart's life, to complete the dramatic arc of his personal and professional decline. In doing so, they almost erase any implied suggestion that Hart was a misunderstood savant, leaving him suspended as a kind of deplorable, failed drunk.

In truth, the banality of genius is probaby more common than not, and the process by which artists create is not always interesting to a casual onlooker. Have you ever sat in on - or been part of - a musical recording session? It's not pretty, often tedious, and definitely not always punctuated with erudite observations or clever wit.

That's what we've left with here: a dull, souless portrait of a lesser known 20th century lyricist, whose ambiguous sexuality and rumored voyeurism, together with assorted personal demons, led to his ostracization from mainstream Broadway musical circles. As depicted here, Lorenz Hart was as much of a contributor to his isolation as the people who failed to see his brilliance: an unlikeable, petty, annoying little man (physically and emotionally) who suffers most from a fatal lack of self-awareness. And his fascination with Elizabeth seems hollow and weird, rather than heartbreaking and haunting.

At the end of the movie, as Hart picks up the gifts he never gave to Elizabeth, puts on his hat and saunters (stumbles?) out of Sardi's, Morty the piano player (Jonah Lees), begins playing and singing "Blue Moon." Hart turns around as Morty stops playing and says, "It's a great song."

"Yes," Hart replies, before taking one final swipe at Oscar Hammerstein, "Certainly better than 'Surrey with the Fuckin' Fringe on Top.'"

Indeed.

Too bad the film as a whole wasn't as ascerbic, or as satisfying.

*******

Blue Moon is rated "R" for language and adult themes. It is currently playing in limited release in theaters. Its streaming date has not yet been released.