‘Blue Moon’ Review: Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley Mesmerize in Richard Linklater’s Affecting Study of a Gifted Artist on a Downhill Slide
The long and rewarding collaboration between Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater stretches back 30 years to Before Sunrise, continuing with the other two parts of that superlative romantic trilogy, filmed at nine-year intervals, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. While that project spanned 27 years, the actor and the director also spent more than a decade shooting Boyhood for a few days at a time, once or twice a year. Their intimate knowledge of artistic symbiosis adds a poignant underlay to Hawke and Linklater’s reunion on Blue Moon, a transfixing character study that X-rays the shaky skeleton of a creative partnership of comparable duration.
Written with wry humor and perspicacity by Robert Kaplow, whose novel was the basis of Linklater’s 2008 feature, Me and Orson Welles, the new film again is set in the world of Broadway and expands on theater lore in illuminating personal ways.
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It unfolds in real time on March 31, 1943, storied opening night of the landmark, genre-redefining musical that would run five years and generate countless tours and revivals, Oklahoma! But its subject is not one of the creative team on that show. Instead, the movie focuses on renowned lyricist Lorenz Hart (Hawke), getting pickled on bourbon down the street at Sardi’s while the New York theaterati toast the success of his composing partner of 20-plus years, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott).
Oklahoma! marked Rodgers’ first time collaborating on a musical with a different partner, librettist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). The gentle tug of pathos that can be felt even beneath the sparkling banter of Blue Moon is fed by the knowledge that Hart would be dead eight months later at 48, succumbing to pneumonia four days after being found shivering in the gutter outside an Eighth Ave. bar he frequented.
But the layered character study also acquires emotional heft from the fact that Rodgers and Hammerstein would go on to become one of the most celebrated creative teams in musical-theater history, far eclipsing Rodgers and Hart.
Not that the latter duo left no legacy. Their most popular shows included A Connecticut Yankee, Babes in Arms, The Boys From Syracuse and Pal Joey. Even more notable, however, was the bulging catalogue of standards absorbed into the Great American Songbook, among them “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Manhattan,” “The Lady is a Tramp” and “This Can’t Be Love,” along with the song that gives this film its title.
Aside from a quick opening shot of Hart collapsing under heavy rainfall in the alley where he was found by a friend before being hospitalized in his final days, only one short scene takes place outside Sardi’s, the popular theater district hangout recreated in Ireland in a very convincing facsimile by production designer Susie Cullen. The scene shows Hart in a box at the St. James Theatre, rolling his eyes and groaning to his mother before slipping out to get a drink during the title song of Oklahoma!
The rest of the movie takes place in its entirety in the restaurant. While Linklater never tries to gloss over the static nature of the setting or the theatricality of material that could easily be a play, he’s a director who has few equals when it comes to keeping a talk-based movie buoyant, a skill that the Before trilogy honed to perfection.
That pertains not just to the dexterity of regular cinematographer Shane F. Kelly’s camerawork, which weaves around the joint playing with spatial dynamics and maintaining visual interest.
It also applies to the superbly cast actors, particularly Hawke and Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland, a 20-year-old Yale student that Hart introduces as his protégée, while also maintaining delusional hopes of a romance, despite the lyricist being unequivocally gay — at least in this account. The actors find music in their reams of dialogue.
Scott has less to say as Rodgers, but he’s such a sensitive actor that he can convey the rush to the composer’s head of a fresh professional triumph, while also showing kindness and even generosity to the collaborator to whom he freely concedes that he owes his career. At the same time, Dick lays down the law with Larry, telling him if they’re going to work together on a new version of Connecticut Yankee, he insists on total professional discipline — no more going AWOL on drinking binges.
Just the look of the two actors here pinpoints the opposite points of their characters’ career trajectories With his greasy combover and slightly disheveled formal wear, Larry is clearly not at his peak, while Dick is a glowing picture of health, dashing in his crisp tuxedo.
Even if Larry’s at a low ebb, he puts on a fairly decent show of confidence and certainly has full command of his razor-sharp wit. When he pulls up a stool to chat with bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale, down to earth as ever), the Sardi’s staffer has the affability required of his profession but also has seen enough of Larry at his worst to keep reminding him that he’s not supposed to be serving him liquor. Hawke gets a devilish light in his eyes as he cajoles Eddie into pouring him a shot and then leaving the bottle, just so he can admire it. But if there’s any sincerity in that promise, it doesn’t hold up for long.
Hawke manages to make Larry as charming as he is seedy, a raconteur entertaining Eddie and the pianist he nicknames Knuckles (Jonah Lees), an enlisted Army man on leave, before the crowd starts pouring in. He flirts with a handsome young guy delivering flowers, insisting that he come to a party later that night at Larry’s apartment, and he lets loose with a marvelously snarky takedown of the uses of an exclamation point on a show title. He also strikes up a convivial conversation with another customer, E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who is more reserved than verbally incontinent Larry but seems to appreciate his humor.
A well-known essayist who seems somewhat burned out on that career path and is moving into children’s books (he would write the classics Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web), White is one of a handful of famous names of the time that either appear or are mentioned. Others include New York photographer Weegee (John Doran) and a precocious kid accompanying his mentor Hammerstein and identified as “Little Stevie” (Cillian Sullivan). If you fail to recognize the 13-year-old boy as Stephen Sondheim, please turn in your theater-geek card on the way out.
Larry is full of praise for Oklahoma! when Dick and Oscar arrive to a hearty round of applause, striking a different tone from his dismissive comments earlier about the artistic merits of the show. He has too much pride to bow and scrape but he’s gracious with his old friend and shows an eagerness with a tinge of desperation as he keeps waylaying Dick to talk with feverish excitement about potential new projects to get them back together.
Hawke is wonderful in those exchanges, subtly exposing the damaged infrastructure of a man who perhaps knows his best work is behind him but is doing everything possible to convince himself otherwise. There’s the tiniest trace of a wince on his face every time Hammerstein reads another ecstatic review snippet as they come in.
An equal amount of Larry’s attention, however, is directed at Elizabeth. The daughter of a member of the influential Theatre Guild, she has her own hobnobbing to do. She disappears to mingle when the opening-night party moves upstairs but returns to spend time with Larry, whose hunger to live vicariously through her account of sex with a dreamboat college boy does little to hide his “proclivities.”
Still, one of the most touching dualities of Hawke’s performance is that he can channel Larry’s queerness while also entertaining the fantasy of a romantic future with Elizabeth. There’s tenderness and compassion in Qualley’s eyes as she says the words no man wants to hear but Larry can easily predict: “I love you, just not in that way.”
Blue Moon is a deceptively modest project, but it’s beautifully executed and fascinatingly nuanced despite being quite straightforward in terms of plot. The movie has a lot to say about the give and take of creative collaboration; the fickle embrace of the then-quite-insular New York theatrical community; the somewhat safe space of that environment for gay men, even if it was seldom spoken of openly; and the fact that even that degree of tacit acceptance does little to alleviate the solitude of the closet.
And in ways to which most of us can probably relate even if we might be reluctant to admit it, the movie is an honest reflection on the conflicted feelings with which we might sometimes greet the success of friends in our fields. It’s another satisfying and characteristically idiosyncratic entry in the fruitful Hawke and Linklater collaboration.
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