Patrick Mulcahy on Blue Moon
“Blue Moon”, the latest film from Richard Linklater, the second most prodigious director (after Steven Soderbergh), working in contemporary American cinema, is a hang-out movie. In 1943, a famous but alcohol-troubled lyricist, Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), slips out of the opening night of “Oklahoma!” written by his former partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), to wait in Sardi’s, a famous restaurant on New York’s Broadway. Here he banters with the barman, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), pianist Morty (Jonah Lees), delivery guy Troy (Giles Surridge) and columnist E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) as he waits to introduce Rodgers to his muse, twenty-year-old Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). Linklater impressed audiences with his second feature, “Slacker” (1990). He cemented his style with the “Before” trilogy, in which two strangers (played by Hawke and Julie Delpy) meet on a train and spend time together.
Linklater is one of the 1990s generation of (male) directors who include Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and Robert Rodriguez, who float between the independent sector and Hollywood and make films that comment or quote from the films or culture that they enjoy. Their work exists in bubbles. They aren’t interested in social change or contemporary politics. Cinema is their safe space. While their films can be exhilarating and fun, they are also backwards-looking, preoccupied with pastiche and the novelty of the past.
Linklater, Smith and others hit cinematic puberty after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of globalisation. If their films don’t question ideology, it is because for them it is not an issue. They can wallow in the privilege of mundanity, with culture replacing ideas. Their lens is critical but sifts out “cool” from “uncool”. We enjoy their opinions, but only to a point.
Linklater’s filmography is much more varied than his contemporaries and skews away from violence. He is interested in relationships and time. He has an optimistic outlook, not merely planning but filming single projects over a number of years, “Boyhood” (filmed over twelve years) and “Merrily We Roll Along”, which he has started and plans to shoot over decades. You think that such films would embrace political change, but “Boyhood” was interested in shifting personal dynamics rather than societal ones, of which a young boy would be more aware.
Scripted by Robert Kaplow, “Blue Moon” is concerned with the niche role played by Broadway musicals in American culture. Hart is interested in satire, Rodgers with heart and hope. We sense that Linklater is on the fence. Hart is a romantic. He has deep feelings for “his protégé” Elizabeth, having brought her a painting of a lake where they spent the summer in chaste cohabitation – Elizabeth loves him “but not in that way” – as well as a copy of M. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” and a $5 vase of roses. Disappointingly small, he swaps the card with a larger bunch addressed to Rodgers. Hart quotes from “Casablanca’, referring to its subtext – two guys leaving together – and picks at Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for “Oklahoma!” “Corn as high as an elephant’s eye. … An elephant in a cornfield?” We enjoy his literate deconstruction, which reminds us of any number of cultural takedowns from 1990s cinema; in Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs’, gangsters discussed the lyrics of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin”. “Blue Moon” feels like the work of a director operating within his comfort zone.
It offers some pleasure. Ethan Hawke is not an actor who openly demonstrates craft, but he is magnetic here. De-glamorised with a wisp of thinning hair that resembles an overused welcome mat covering his balding head, he relishes his dialogue, changing accents for emphasis. His Hart is indiscreet yet romantic, desperate yet principled, insincere yet bursting to give his opinion. His edgy performance contrasts with the other actors, but we sense that Hart is hollow and knows it. When sharing the screen with Qualley, Hawke dials down. The younger actress, who played Demi Moore’s younger alter-ego in last year’s hit, “The Substance”, shines as Hart’s confidante whose objective is to meet Rodgers and establish herself in the theatre. Praise is the way to do it. Hart’s negativity is, by contrast, surplus to requirements.
We see Hart appear to inspire E.B. White to create the character of Stuart Little, based on the mouse Hart trapped in his apartment and freed, only to return, and meet the young “Stevie” Sondheim. These encounters seem like gilding. We know Hart is fighting a losing cause. The film opens six months after the “Oklahoma!” premiere, with him collapsing in a rainy alley. He isn’t portrayed as a standard bearer for lost values, although his songs, including the title number, are quoted throughout. He is reduced to being just another alcoholic who failed to tackle his addiction. The effect is that “Blue Moon” plays like an eyeful of pathos.
“Blue Moon” premiered in the UK at the 2025 London Film Festival and opens in cinemas on 28 November 2025.