Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is an elegy disguised as a conversation. Set over a single evening in 1943, the film imagines one long, whisky-soaked night in the life of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), the once-celebrated half of the songwriting duo Rodgers & Hart. While the musical Oklahoma!—Rodgers’s first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II—opens to thunderous applause across town, Hart sits at a bar wrestling with the loss of relevance, friendship, and self-worth. The title, borrowed from his most famous song, doubles as a metaphor: a reminder that brilliance sometimes burns out before anyone notices it’s gone.
The entire film unfolds inside a mid-century Manhattan watering hole, where Broadway producers, chorus girls, and newspapermen drift in and out as Hart drinks, jokes, rants, and occasionally charms them. Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, adapted from his stage play, refuses conventional biopic structure. There are no flashbacks, montage sequences, or swelling musical cues. Instead, Linklater presents the night almost in real time, letting the rhythm of conversation replace traditional plot.
This approach can feel claustrophobic, but that’s the point. The cramped bar becomes a psychological space, a stage for Hart’s unraveling mind. The camera lingers on cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling or on the reflections of neon in the mirrors, turning small talk into confession. The pacing is slow, deliberate, and often hypnotic—an approach that recalls Linklater’s earlier Before trilogy, where dialogue itself becomes drama.
Linklater shoots Blue Moon with an intimacy that borders on theatrical minimalism. Every frame seems aware of time passing—of an era dying while another is being born. The director’s gift for observing human behavior finds perfect material in Hart’s contradictions: his quick wit colliding with self-loathing, his affection undercut by cruelty. Linklater resists the temptation to romanticize his subject; he’s interested not in redemption but in recognition.
The tone balances irony with melancholy. There are moments of real laughter—Hart skewering his own lyrics, or teasing a young admirer—but beneath the humor lies exhaustion. Linklater treats Hart’s bitterness not as spectacle but as symptom, an artist’s defense against invisibility. When the bar empties near dawn, the silence feels earned.
Ethan Hawke delivers one of the most nuanced performances of his career. His Lorenz Hart is neither tragic saint nor villain; he’s a man drowning in his own brilliance. Hawke captures the lyricist’s manic charm—rapid-fire jokes, flirtatious asides, sudden fits of rage—while exposing the fragile core beneath. His physical transformation is subtle but striking: the nervous energy, the slouched posture, the trembling hands of someone trying to hold both glass and identity steady.
Hawke’s chemistry with Andrew Scott, who appears briefly as Richard Rodgers, provides the film’s emotional center. Their reunion scene—an exchange that oscillates between affection and accusation—is devastating in its restraint. Margaret Qualley, as Elizabeth Weiland, a young woman who sees flashes of the genius still flickering in Hart, brings lightness and curiosity to the film’s shadowed palette. Her scenes with Hawke hint at tenderness but stop short of sentimentality; she’s less love interest than mirror, reflecting the humanity Hart can’t see in himself.
At its heart, Blue Moon is about obsolescence—the fear of being replaced, forgotten, or left behind by the very art you helped create. Hart’s predicament mirrors a broader truth about creative life: that genius offers no guarantee of happiness or stability. The film also probes questions of sexuality and self-censorship. Living in a time when being openly gay could destroy a career, Hart’s repression curdles into cynicism. Linklater and Kaplow treat this not as a political statement but as emotional reality: a man cut off from his own longing, forced to sublimate desire into rhyme.
Another recurring idea is the tension between collaboration and solitude. Rodgers and Hart’s partnership produced some of the greatest songs of the 1930s, yet Blue Moon suggests that collaboration can also become a cage. As Rodgers’s success with Hammerstein grows, Hart’s self-image collapses. He can’t bear to watch the future marching forward without him, yet he’s powerless to join it.
The production design is meticulous but unobtrusive. The bar’s deep mahogany and amber lighting evoke the world of pre-war Manhattan without resorting to nostalgia. Cinematographer Shane F. Kelly (a longtime Linklater collaborator) uses long takes and gentle camera drift, emphasizing continuity rather than cutting. The result feels less like a reconstruction of the 1940s than a memory—soft around the edges, half-lit, always on the verge of fading.
Sound design plays a quiet but crucial role. The distant applause from the theater across town, the clinking of ice in a glass, the faint echo of Blue Moon on a jukebox—all serve as reminders of the life Hart once had, now just out of reach.
The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to conform. Blue Moon demands patience; it invites you to sit still, listen, and absorb. For viewers attuned to Linklater’s conversational style, the experience is deeply rewarding. Every line of dialogue feels like a fragment of a song lyric—witty, bruised, and searching for rhythm.
Still, its very restraint will test some audiences. The lack of narrative drive can make the film feel static, especially during its middle section. Linklater’s commitment to realism sometimes verges on indulgence; a few scenes linger longer than necessary, and the emotional payoff is subtle enough that casual viewers might miss it. But these quibbles pale beside the film’s emotional authenticity.
By the time dawn breaks and Hart stumbles out of the bar, we’ve come to understand him—not as a cautionary tale, but as an emblem of creative loneliness. His tragedy is not that he failed, but that he succeeded too soon and loved too hard. Linklater frames him as a man who wrote songs about love yet never learned how to receive it.
The final scene, quiet and unsentimental, leaves a bruise rather than a tear. Hawke hums the opening bars of “Blue Moon,” voice barely above a whisper, before the screen fades to black. It’s one of those endings that feels less like closure than surrender.
Blue Moon is a small film about big emotions—a character study rendered with patience, empathy, and extraordinary craft. It won’t please those expecting spectacle, but for anyone who values performance-driven cinema, it’s a rare gem. Linklater proves again that conversation can be as cinematic as action, and Hawke gives a master class in restraint.
In the crowded landscape of 2025 releases, Blue Moon stands apart precisely because it refuses to chase modern tempo. It lingers, listens, and trusts its audience to do the same. Like the song that inspired it, the film is bittersweet, haunting, and—true to its name—something that doesn’t come around often.
Blue Moon is in theatres today!
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