Life was a bitter cup for the saddest of all men (bomp-bada-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-ba-bomp dang-da-dang-dang-ding-a-dong-ding)

BLUE MOON

2025

Directed by Richard Linklater

Written by Robert Kaplow

Spoilers: for what, Oklahoma!? I mean, high, I guess

I don't want to box it up too neatly, but if you're going to have just one takeaway from Blue Moon, it's that it represents Richard Linklater coming back to doing what you'd probably like Richard Linklater to do if you are, in fact, a Richard Linklater fan; I toyed with the idea of saying "finally coming back," though that's obviously complicated by the existence of 2022's Apollo 10 1/2—an animated listicle running down the formative pop cultural elements of a Texan youth's Gen X childhood, and hence a movie I assume and frankly hope that only Linklater could or would make—and by Nouvelle Vague, Linklater's other movie from 2025, which I believe became accessible earlier in 2025 than Blue Moon, and might very well be just as Linklatery though I probably won't find out anytime soon due to a disinterest in its subject matter.  But otherwise it's been a good little while since a Linklater has hit most if not all of the boxes you'd associate with his characteristic work—probably being a period piece, probably taking place in something close to real time (most typically over the course of a night), and definitely involving just wall-to-wall yapping from people usually smarter than they should be and never as smart as think they are, and who not only don't have that much to actually say, but are actively avoiding saying what they do have to say by hardly ever shutting up long enough to let themselves get a word in edgewise, so that their dialogues, or monologues, while entertaining, serve more as something like the ornamental texture of the films containing them.  Not all his "characteristic" films check all these boxes, though Blue Moon does, and to boot it checks the box that I didn't mention, because it's not precisely a determiner of how much it feels like an archetypal "Linklater movie" and is instead just something very close to a guarantee of a top-shelf Linklater movie,* this being the presence of Ethan Hawke, whose career has long, long been intertwined with Linklater's, though they've been working apart long enough for it to jar you into sure wishing they'd stayed working together, because the former's return has just been so reviving for the latter.

The scenario for "Hawke yaps" that Linklater's devised this time is nonetheless unusual for a filmmaker whose concerns are more typically confined to his own Gen X life cycle, and he's cast Hawke as Lorenz "Larry" Hart, the lyricist and first (and less famous) partner of composer Richard Rodgers in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s.  If we're being sticklers, Linklater didn't actually devise it, as this marks one of the director's comparatively few films without any writing credit for him—it was written instead by Robert Kaplow, author of the book that Me and Orson Welles was based on, so, one surmises, "the guy Linklater knew who had the period expertise"—though if I'm speculating, and I might as well, the speculation would be that Linklater's decision circa 2019 to embark upon a Boyhood-esque, years-spanning, aging-in-real-time production of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along prompted a new interest in the history of American musical theater and Linklater was the prime mover of this film anyway, since he didn't want to wait a Boyhood-sized amount of time to start satisfying that interest.  Accordingly, with that one being tentatively scheduled to be finished in 2040—my own assumption is that it will never exist, call me a pessimist if you must**—in the meantime we got Blue Moon.

So we find Larry in the year 1943, specifically on the evening of March 31st, 1943, a night of immense personal importance for him, though its importance to the history of musical theater and to American culture writ large sort of has nothing to do with him, which is why he's so agitated: it's the opening night of a little show called Oklahoma!, its music by his already-ex-partner Rodgers (Andrew Scott) but lyrics by Rodgers's replacement for him, Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney); you can therefore see why (in addition to the natural human instinct to walk out on Oklahoma!) Larry absconds before the show's even over, and heads directly over to Sardi's to hopefully get drunk before Rodgers and Hammerstein and their hangers-on get there and he has to pretend—he will pretend exceedingly poorly—he liked the show while simultaneously plying Rodgers with pitches for a renewed collaboration with himself.  Bartender Eddie (Bobby Canvale) is very aware of Larry's intermediate goal, and halfheartedly tries to remind him he's a godawful drunk who's supposed to have stopped drinking, a game Larry is willing to play for at least a little while.  Larry's got another reason to be here, though: he's meeting Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), an eyebrow-raisingly younger protege whom he very much would like to be more—he'd say he's in love with her, he's certainly enamored with her, and while "Elizabeth Weiland" does not appear to be a historical figure (ETA: oopsy-daisy) I assume this must have some measure of historicity to it or else I'd have heard at least some critique of the movie about the famously homosexual lyricist lusting after the girl—and, anyway, Larry has decided the very worst night of his life would be the ideal time to make his play.

The bar Blue Moon had to clear is a low one: it just had to be better than the other Larry Hart biopic (not that this is a biopic, in the pejorative sense) that I've seen, 1948's Words and Music, a movie where Lorenz Hart is not an alcoholic, not gay, and—hand to God—Oscar Hammerstein is never mentioned, and which, for that matter, is just an excuse for Rodgers & Hart songs which it turns out I mostly do not like.  (Blue Moon's Larry has cause to bitterly complain that his biggest hit, by 1943—and, spoilers, hence forever—has been the titular song, which he claims to hate, which he probably really did due to the annoyances of writing and rewriting it for a notes-happy MGM in the 1930s.  Even so, it's his "immortality" as a lyricist, though while it's a Rodgers & Hart tune I genuinely do enjoy, I'm not sure it would have managed to become truly immortal, beyond the memory of specialists, except for the intercession of The Marcels some time after the events of this movie.)  In any event, in Blue Moon Lorenz Hart is an alcoholic, is gay, or at least we understand that he normally is, and Oscar Hammerstein is right there being a freakish giant, psychically grinding Larry into dust, so it's gotten that far already.  The one metric by which Words & Music could claim superiority is that that movie cast Mickey Rooney, so Larry Hart was short.  Now, to be fair, he is, after a fashion, still short in Blue Moon...

People have, of course, identified certain issues with Blue Moon, and I'm not saying the slightest thing new here in the March of 2026 to note the existence of what amounts to a threshold problem with the film, that Hawke is 5'10" and change and instead of a "Larry Hart" who is 5'10" and change we do still have a Larry Hart who's 5' nothing or less, Linklater approaching the challenge of making a movie about a diminutive Golden Age lyricist in largely the same way Peter Jackson approached the challenge of making movies about Middle Earth hobbits.  I understand many observers found this to be inordinately distracting—I would not rule out the possibility that there are shots in this movie where Hawke is standing in a hole, or literally walking on his knees—but I ultimately found it more cute in its effortfulness than "bad," and honestly I think I was more distracted by the crispness of Hawke's shaved pate and the uncanny effect of Hart's unfortunate combover by way of this actor.  The other problem, somewhat more of a problem for me but I'd hazard less of a film-defining one in objective terms, is that, as it sends Larry in circles through this bar, Kaplow's screenplay, evidently having no better options, will from time to time take refuge in a fair amount of charmless Forrest Gumping—not merely the presumptive exigence for the movie, a baby version of Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan) is actually in this movie, and sometimes the "and then Lorenz Hart influenced this famous person" modules won't even have that connection to musical theater—which I suspect you will find annoying in absolutely direct proportion to how immediately you recognize the reference being made.  There is also the film's manufacture, as a film, and one could potentially accuse Linklater of being so consumed with tinifying Hawke that every other aspect of its aesthetic suffers, and that's arguably somewhat true—it's not one of Linklater's Netflix movies but it's where I saw it and it still kind of looks like one, in its lacerating sharpness and in the way cinematographer Shane Kelly has run counter to the contemporary trend of underlighting by recourse to a modest overlighting, and compounding that with a milkily diffuse "bar in the 1940s" haze that somehow doesn't overtake the sharpness or even seem to be recognizably motivated by the actual light sources—but aside from the rather stagey-looking Sardi's, which for all I can tell has intention behind it (Hart lived a life of stagey artifice, after all, and there's undoubtedly purpose to how readily the expanse of this 'Scope-ratioed, for-the-most-part-empty bar swallows up its smallest patron), Linklater has at least made an effective movie, which isn't nothing for an object this cussedly constrained by all those Aristotlean unities (and Linklater certainly knows from such constraints) and it never quite runs out of interesting ways to visualize a single location that itself is very much confined to a single-character point-of-view.

Obviously, Hawke helps a lot, and this is the Hawke show, and despite having a solid secondary ensemble they're basically only there to listen to Hawke's Hart and to feed him or, even in Qualley's case, give him something to react to silently, or, scratch that, without stomping all over her lines.  The most unavoidable phrase in discussions of Blue Moon is "holding court" and boy does this Hart ever, a font of anecdotes and observations and smugly fixed ideas, especially regarding musical theater—the screenplay is certainly very fixed on the idea of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals being corny, and Rodgers & Hart musicals being sophisticated, and I suppose I should cop to not being the best student of musical theater, my entrypoint to my beloved genre of film musicals being dance, rather than the American songbook or whatever the phrase is, and so—whatever was happening on the stage in the 1940s—I tend to find the enduring criticism of Rogers & Hammerstein as simplistic and frivolous to be awfully disorienting, considering my abiding problem with them is that they're always stupidly tripping into harrowing seriousness, starting exactly here with Oklahoma!, a show most saliently about warding off a rapist, so that (at least in the movie) there's something like two hours' worth of it instead of singing in cornfields.

Anyway, Larry's an invigorating little dude, but also altogether fucking exhausting, and you can readily understand why Rodgers might've gotten sick of him even in the absence of the drinking problem that was the exigence for their split (Scott makes it clear he both misses his old partner and is increasingly annoyed that he won't take the bone of a Connecticut Yankee remake he throws at him, refusing to shut up about a somehow-semi-autobiographical concept of a show about Marco Polo).  He's better company for the duration of, and indeed for the audience of, a movie—you can see how it might've come to pass that Eddie, an essentially transactional acquaintance, probably likes him more than anybody else—and Hawke comprehends, whether or not Larry does, that his conversation-dominating erudition spiked with vulgarity stopped being a way to get people to actually like him ages ago, and more of a way just to command their attention towards him, while even that power is diminishing, but if self-amusement by way of self-degradation alternating with self-aggrandizement is all he's got left, he's going to ride it, straight into the ground.

And what I very purposely left out of the plot summary above is how the movie starts, which is several months later, with Larry Hart collapsing in a rainswept alley underneath a radio announcement of his subsequent death, not exactly as an in medias res gambit—Hart passed on November 22nd, 1943—though Blue Moon absolutely wants you to connect the cause and the effect.***  There's not that much purpose in running through the "events" of Blue Moon in much more detail than I already have, or in describing the usually one-sided conversations Larry has with people, the exception being what more-or-less serves as the climax, which finds Qualley at last reappearing into a movie that I think perceived a need to introduce her earlier than it strictly did need to, so that she's both in the bar and not in the movie for what I'm pretty sure is about a full hour, serving as a structuring absence that's weirdly still kind-of present (so what might be more distracting than height or baldness or dumb references, it's that while I'm pretty sure there is a stated reason for Elizabeth flitting off to another floor of Sardi's, I did quietly ask myself, "is Elizabeth taking a giant shit? Jesus, is Elizabeth having a miscarriage?").  Well, for the record, Qualley is aces in that "climax," finding the subtext of material that ought to be underscoring for Larry just how young she actually is, and how much her pose of sophistication is a phony, kludged-together performance that she's adopted more by way of canny instinct than even conscious intent—though I suppose you can see, right there, how he could easily see something of himself in her.

Anyway, the point is that even without that opening, the material would be sufficiently interesting and Hawke undoubtedly sufficiently magnetic (and at turns fascinatingly repulsive), for the movie to get by as a dynamic comic hangout and a character study of this pitiful man named "Larry Hart"—in its wide-ranging discursion, it's already something of a one-man Waking Life, while, in its pathetic, grasping middle-aged Hawke, a spiritual sequel to a version of Before Midnight that ended differently—but the fatalism the opening occasions is probably the thing that makes it most worthwhile as a story, casting a shadow over the entire affair that Larry, which is to say Hawke, is able to dispel through sheer force of will for a while, but not by the end, with the whole movie increasingly revealing its true shape of a suicide run at life, undertaken with bluster and bravado but only a heartbreakingly small measure of actual hope, to fix what's wrong with Larry Hart's existence; we already know his self-annihilating gamble does not work out, and some time before the movie's entirely over, Larry Hart has given up even as much hope as he started with.  The movie concludes with "Blue Moon" irritating Larry, but not enough to keep him from launching into yet another story; the story has already concluded, and Larry has already collapsed in that alley ready to die of pneumonia a few days later, because unbeknownst to anybody, quite likely including himself—but not the actor playing him, for Hawke has always been the man you want when you need a performance that understands in fullness the demons driving a character, without letting the person he's playing understand them in turn—he has accepted his fate, part and parcel to a heroic sacrifice that only makes good sense if Larry Hart is the only real person in Larry Hart's world, though it is heroic, since that is pretty much how Larry's worldview works, all to save the two people he loves the most from, essentially, himself.  Blue Moon's basically just a lark, I suppose, and to no small extent it's an excuse to indulge in artificially-nostalgic minutia about a new hobby that Linklater's apparently picked up, that as a period piece can't benefit from the usual fuzzy experientialism his firsthand memory affords.  But the beauty it finds in the self-destructive tendencies of this man who died miserable and humiliated gives it a distinctive melancholy that I wouldn't necessarily have expected from any 40s songwriter biopic, or even from this filmmaker.  It's a good one.

Score: 8/10

*And may God damn you for forcing me to asterisk this, Boyhood.

**Leaving aside "it's by no means unlikely that Richard Linklater could die some time before he's reached his eightieth birthday, and Boyhood had a built-in flexibility (one of the reasons it's sort of null content, honestly) that this project does not, and 2040 is on the other side of the apocalypse, probably," Merrily We Roll Along has gotten set back seriously once already, when its lead got cancelled for domestic abuse.

***Though Hart's real-life downward spiral towards November 22nd likely had as much to do with his mother's death in April.