TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Although it is steeped in 1940s Broadway trivia to an unusual degree for the often contemporary filmmaker, Blue Moon is a quintessential Linklater film in the ways that count. If its period trappings most recall Me and Orson Welles, a movie based on a novel by this film’s screenwriter, Robert Kaplow, its charged, one-night-only setting at a bar in the theatre district on the night of Oklahoma!‘s Broadway premiere, where Hart prepares to swallow his pride and congratulate the estranged Rodgers (Andrew Scott) at the after-party, feels of a piece with Linklater’s frequent experimentations with time and duration, from the Before Trilogy to Boyhood. Not unlike Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, it’s also an easygoing Linklater hangout movie, albeit one about an anxious outsider on a career downslope, lingering at the periphery of several groups at a soirée to which he’s invited himself.

As smoothly as the film goes down, there’s real friction between the uneventful plot, concerning people in different stages of their professional careers mingling at a reception, and the relatively high stakes of what this night means to Hart. Despite feigning a kind of casual bemusement at his friend’s big night, Hart is simultaneously heartbroken at his estrangement from Rodgers and anxious to get back in his good books to prevent Hammerstein from becoming his de facto partner going forward. He’s also monitoring his liquor intake–which should be but isn’t zero–while watching the door for a backup plan in the form of an appearance from his much younger crush and creative protégé, Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), who appreciates him in a strictly platonic way. (Though others assume he’s gay, Hart calls himself “omnisexual” and appears to have displaced his break from Rodgers, seemingly the love of his life, onto his obviously unattainable pursuit of Elizabeth.) Superficially, the film is loosely structured as a series of tableside encounters between Hart and figures like kindly bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), Rodgers–who is still triggered by Hart’s sour temperament and the end of their professional relationship due to Hart’s alcoholism–and Elizabeth, with whom he sneaks away for a long, sad backroom heart-to-heart, where she regales him with her recent sexual escapades at his masochistic encouragement. But there’s palpable tension in Hart’s tortured clock-watching as he feels the night slipping away from him, closing time drawing ever near as his to-do list for the evening goes mostly unchecked.

Hawke is an inspired choice for Hart, despite looking nothing like him. On the one hand, he’s effectively doing a form of disability drag here, obscuring his rumpled good looks to physically transform himself into the short, balding artist the way any number of awards contenders have faked limps and donned scars or hunchbacks to draw attention to how thoroughly they’ve inhabited the Other. Some of that transformation comes from (the arguably a bit distracting) makeup, and some of it comes from Linklater’s playful blocking and compositions, which see Hart holding court at the edge of tables or at the bottom of staircases while his betters in stature–ascending in their careers as his own craters–tower over him. There’s a genuine thematic weight to the moments where Hart’s height disparity from the people he admires puts him at a remove. That depiction transcends the shoddy tradition of acting by prosthetics and trickery that the bald cap and forced-perspective shots might evoke, only partially recalling actors shrunk to Hobbit proportions in the Lord of the Rings films, or beautiful performers like Charlize Theron dirtying up their faces for the likes of Monster.

If Hawke acquits himself better than most at this sort of corporeal slumming, it’s because he finds that dichotomy of sadness and energy in Hart’s peculiar, embodied experience of the world. He’s not a pretty actor uglying up, but a credible Broadway songwriting titan humbled, as Hawke mentioned during a post-screening Q&A at TIFF, by the realization that an underling like Elizabeth can simply pat him on the head from a great height and reduce him to nothing. It helps that playing a chatty depressive is not much of a stretch for an actor whose secret weapon, particularly in his collaborations with Linklater, has always been the incongruity of his boyish face and his restless, inquisitive approach to the world–his search for answers to whatever’s adding worry lines to his forehead coming out through his loquaciousness. A natural talker, Hawke makes an excellent Hart, a diminutive guy who plays to the rafters in any room, filling up space as he whirls from table to table bursting with tart complaints about movie dialogue (“How can you break a goddamn precedent?” he says of Casablanca‘s script), pithy reviews of popular musical tastes (“Demand more,” he says of Oklahoma!‘s future fans), and even a kind word for comrades like Rodgers, who he dreamily describes as having the capacity to get a melody to “levitate” with barely any effort at all. His Hart beautifully splits the difference between Hammerstein’s and Mercer’s impressions of the real man, cursed to be the most urbane person in the room, ever charming the people he resents the most. Programme: Centrepiece