Life
Blue Moon review: ‘Ethan Hawke turns in a superb performance’ ★★★★
The actor’s portrayal of the waspish, Jewish lovelorn lyricist Lorenx Hart is excellent
December 2, 2025 18:37
The actor’s portrayal of the waspish, Jewish lovelorn lyricist Lorenx Hart is excellent
December 2, 2025 18:37Sporting the most extreme combover since Bobby Charlton, Ethan Hawke turns in a superb performance as the waspish, Jewish, tragically lovelorn lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Set almost entirely in the bar at New York’s famous Broadway restaurant Sardi’s, director Richard Linklater’s film begins in earnest in 1943 on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the smash hit that Hart’s long-time composing partner Richard Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein.
Unable to stick with such sentimental, happy-go-lucky crowd-pleasing material (never trust a show with an exclamation mark in the title, Hart warns), or is it the sheer hurt of watching his partner succeed with someone else, Hart leaves the show early to occupy the Sardi’s stool and the attention of barman and confidant Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), who fails to ward Hart off the booze that ruined his career.
If this film had started out as a play, it would have been criticised for failing to adapt to the screen. As it is, Linklater and his co-screenwriter Robert Kaplow bravely stick to their guns by being determinedly theatrical in both concept and execution.
The work is essentially a series of conversations between two people, one of whom is always Hart. Belying everyone’s assumption that he is gay, Hart is besotted with Margaret Qualley’s Yale theatre student Elizabeth Weiland (the conversations are based on their real-life correspondence) who turns up as planned but hoping for an introduction to Rodgers.
Against all the evidence (she’s 20, blonde and beautiful and Hart is short, balding and middle-aged) Hart hopes that tonight is the night when the relationship becomes romantic. He is equally desperate to reignite his relationship with Rodgers, played by a brittle and suave Andrew Scott.
Hawke superbly delivers a portrait of man who is unrequited in almost every way he wants to be loved. However, what elevates the script to something much more interesting than a portrait of a sad man is that Hart is always investigating the tensions between art that is good and art that is popular. They are not always the same thing.
Cert 15
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