Some biographical movies try to pack the full arc of someone’s existence into two hours onscreen. Blue Moon, the nifty new feature from director Richard Linklater, opts instead to cover one night in the life of its subject, the lyricist Lorenz Hart. It’s an approach I appreciate, and not just because the more ground a movie tries to cover, the more it risks feeling like Walk Hard, a comedy that should be required viewing for anyone even considering making a biopic. Leaning into self-imposed limitations can be liberating for a genre that’s always going to be dealing with the greatest limitation of all, which is that no amount of vocal training and prosthetics will ever make an actor into the celebrity or historical figure they’re playing. It shouldn’t have to — it should be allowed to be a performance — and yet when it comes to real people, we focus on accuracy at the expense of interpretation. Ethan Hawke affects a comb-over, a New York accent, and a series of shots carefully rigged to make him look five feet tall in Blue Moon, but he’s also clearly playing a character rather than stuck doing an impression. His Lorenz ricochets around the famous Theater District restaurant Sardi’s like an increasingly booze-addled pinball, never feeling like he’s supposed to represent the man in his entirety but attempting to capture his essence at a major turning point.
It doesn’t hurt that Hart’s life isn’t as well known as his work is. His partnership with composer Richard Rodgers yielded over two dozen musicals and countless Great American Songbook standards, including the tune for which Blue Moon is named. But on March 31, 1943, when the film takes place, Richard (played by a carefully smoothed-over Andrew Scott) is celebrating the fruits of a new alliance with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Oklahoma! has just kicked off what would go on to become a legendary run on Broadway, though Lorenz, for reasons both personal and professional, has walked out of the show to get an early start on his drinking at the after-party. He finds Oklahoma! cloying and dishonest and, in his telling, declined the opportunity to adapt the source material, a play called Green Grow the Lilacs, with his longtime collaborator. Richard’s account would probably differ and have more to do with Lorenz’s alcoholism, depression, erratic work habits, and aversion to sentimentality. Either way, Lorenz has been effectively dumped by his former creative partner, who hasn’t just moved on but become the toast of the town, leaving him to drown his bitterness in bourbon while lobbing pitches for an epic about Marco Polo that seems to have a lot to do with his own fixation on a co-ed named Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley).
Lorenz is the kind of role that Hawke thrives in — a big talker and a self-mythologizer who everyone can’t help but like, despite being aware that he’s mostly full of shit. He wisely approaches the character like he’s giving a performance of a performance, his Lorenz committing himself as thoroughly as he can to acting like someone who’s happy and having a good time despite everything in his life crumbling away. His obsession with Elizabeth, the purported new love that’s given him a reason to keep going, is itself a put-on, though one that everyone else is readier to acknowledge than he is. Whether Hart was closeted or, as this screen version insists, an equal-opportunity lover, his interest seems to have as much to do with wanting to slip into her youthful life as it does any erotic longing. After delivering arias about his lust for her to bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and pianist Morty (Jonah Lees), he actually greets her like the gay best friend she’s canny enough to pretend he isn’t, eager to hear her stories about hooking up with her longtime crush at Yale. Hawke’s isn’t a showy performance, despite Lorenz’s brash persona. The excellence of it is in the little touches, the ways he lets the despair seep out, even when everyone around him knows to play along.
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Blue Moon is one of two Linklater movies out this year, both period pieces about tumultuous creative legends. Nouvelle Vague, his black-and-white movie about a young Jean-Luc Godard, turned the making of Breathless into a “let’s put on a show” lark in which a smirking kid confounds his colleagues while happening to remake the language of cinema. Blue Moon is more melancholy and more prone to contrivance — the script, by Me and Orson Welles writer Robert Kaplow, punctuates its sharp patter with the occasional groan-worthy moment, like when Lorenz strikes up a conversation with E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) and gives him the idea for Stuart Little. But it’s just as unexpectedly rewarding, if also a counterpoint to the way Nouvelle Vague emphasizes that genius can look like disaster in the moment. There’s never any question that Lorenz is brilliant, something that the movie elegantly offers evidence of in the ways the character talks about the language that he loves, the internal rhymes, the phrasing. He’s a disaster who looks like a genius, and his tragedy is that all the talent in the world isn’t worth a thing if you can’t actually work. There, in the comfortable confines of a Broadway institution, he mingles with the greats of his industry, then watches as they move on, leaving him there at the bar to drink himself to death — an imminent end that Blue Moon assures us is coming, though it doesn’t need to, when it can be felt in every interaction its character has.
