Blue Moon: A Review - Ethan Hawke Hits it Over the Moon

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed film that features a very noteworthy performance from Ethan Hawke that makes it well-worth watching.

Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke, tells the story of famed lyricist Lorenz Hart (Hawke) navigating emotional turmoil as he attends the 1943 opening night party of his former writing partner Richard Rodgers’ new Broadway musical Oklahoma!

The film, which has garnered two Academy Award nominations – Best Actor for Ethan Hawke and Best original Screenplay for Robert Kaplow, hit theatres on October 17th with little fanfare and is now available to stream on Netflix…which is where I just watched it.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lorenz Hart, he – along with his collaborator Richard Rodgers, made up Rodgers and Hart - one of the great musical duos in music theatre history – creating such notable numbers as “Lady is a Tramp”, “Isn’t it Romantic?”, “My Funny Valentine”, and of course, “Blue Moon”.

Hart was a notorious drunk and difficult collaborator, and so Rodgers looked for other writing partners and found one in Oscar Hammerstein…and remarkably that duo outdid the success of Rodgers and Hart – churning out a bevy of Broadway box office smash hits like Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music among others.

Which brings us to Blue Moon, which is a curious venture.

The film is, in a clever nod to its subject, essentially a stage play, as it is set in Sardi’s bar – the famed apres-show eatery for Broadway big wigs, where Lorenz Hart, struggling with alcoholism mixed with self-doubt and existential angst, holds court amongst wannabes and some notable somebodies, as he awaits a party to start for his former partner Richard Rodgers on opening night of his soon-to-be smash hit musical Oklahoma!

Anyone who has spent even a modicum of time in the theatre or entertainment world is very familiar with the archetype of the aging gay queen that poor Lorenz Hart is occupying as he holds court at the corner of a bar regaling sycophants, stoics and sad sacks alike with his wondrous tales, which, if seen through more discerning eyes are less funny comic confessionals than they are malignant, narcissistic ramblings.

The film is contained within the walls of Sardi’s, and that is the stage for Ethan Hawke to spin his masterful brilliance as Hart flails with flair on the downward spiral of his life.

Ethan Hawke has done some of his very best work with Richard Linklater at the helm (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood) and Blue Moon is the very best of the bunch. He is utterly fantastic in this role. Hawke’s Hart is a magnetic, brilliant, and existentially sad shlub, marinated in a profound melancholy of his own making and it is absolutely captivating to behold.

Hawke’s Hart is funny, frustrating and at times deeply moving and always compelling. Hawke is nominated for Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards and while he stands no chance to win, he certainly is deserving of the award.

As much as I loved Ethan Hawke in the film and also loved that it is essentially a stage play, Blue Moon does have some major flaws to it.

First off, the character of Elizabeth – the Yale undergrad theatre student with whom Hart has become infatuated despite his being homosexual, is, despite being a cornerstone of the storytelling, a not-needed and often annoying distraction.

To be clear, I love Margaret Qualley – the actress who plays Elizabeth, and have ever since I first saw her in Novitiate in 2017. She is a dynamic talented and a luminous beauty…but both the Elizabeth character and Qualley’s performance just don’t work for me.

The same is true of Bobby Cannavale as the bartender Eddie. I must admit that I think Bobby Cannavale is awful in everything I see him in…and he makes everything he is in worse…and Blue Moon is no exception.

Andrew Scott and Patrick Kennedy fare much better in supporting roles as Richard Rodgers and E.B. White respectively…so there’s that.

But again…even as much as I liked Kennedy’s reserved performance as E.B. White, it touches upon another issue I had with the film…namely the Zelig/Forest Gump-esque quality of Lorenz Hart in this film to touch history with his nearly every interaction.

For example, Hart gives prescient writing advice to E.B. White (who goes on the write Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little), prescient storytelling advice to George Roy Hill (who goes on the direct Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among others), and prescient insight to a pre-pubescent Stephen Sondheim (who goes on to be a giant in musical theatre).

This series of historical interactions is so cheesy it made my lactose intolerance act up…and most importantly…it is entirely made up…it never happened in real life. Why the writer Kaplow and Linklater thought the story needed this corny nonsense is utterly beyond me.

Kaplow did write a strong one-man show for Hawke to flex his acting monologue muscles as Hart, and he should be credited for that, but he stumbles badly in terms of structure and secondary characters and storylines.

As for Linklater, Blue Moon is the second film he has put out this year, the other being Nouvelle Vague – the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic French new wave film Breathless. Nouvelle Vague served little purpose but to get people to watch Breathless again…or for the first time…and that’s a noble cause, but Blue Moon feels like the more compelling movie to me…maybe that’s because I know less about Lorenz hart and musical theatre than I do about Breathless and French New Wave cinema….who knows?

The truth is that neither film is quite as good as it should have been…but Blue Moon is a much better movie because Ethan Hawke is absolutely crushing it in the lead role.

The bottom line is that while Blue Moon certainly has its flaws, it is an undeniably compelling watch simply because Ethan Hawke is so damn good as Lorenz Hart.

If you are a current or former theatre muffin, or if you are a devout and devoted lover of musical theatre, I think Blue Moon will be worth a watch to get a glimpse of Hawke masterfully bringing the troubled Lorenz Hart back to life before your eyes.

For those not as enamored of musical theatre, fret not…Blue Moon still works as a one-man Ethan Hawke acting show that will hold your attention despite its unevenness. So, if you get a chance, you could do worse than check out Blue Moon.

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