Summary

Richard Linklater's Blue Moon (2025) poster with Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley

Ethan Hawke mesmerises in this intimate, elegantly staged portrait of a genius fading on the margins of Broadway history.

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein became Broadway legends, there was Rodgers and Hart, the duo behind classics like “Blue Moon,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon zeroes in on the pivotal moment when that first great partnership conclusively dissolved, and a new era in American musical theatre began.

The film opens with Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) collapsing drunk in a rainy alley. From there, Robert Kaplow’s screenplay unfolds with the intimacy of a stage production, nowhere more so than in the first half hour, which plays out as a freewheeling monologue. Hart holds court with Sardi’s bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and pianist Morty (Jonah Lees), bitterly riffing opinions on the debut of Oklahoma! and the virtues of his ‘irreplaceable’ Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley).

Yet this theatricality is precisely how Kaplow and Hawke draw you into Hart’s solipsistic world. It’s 31 March 1943 and the opening night of his longtime collaborator’s hit. He riffs with other luminaries – writer E.B. White (played with low-key excellence by Patrick Kennedy) sits quietly in the corner for a time – and anxiously claws his ideas for a new musical onto the celebratory Rodgers (Andrew Scott).

In an award-worthy performance, Hawke gives the semi-closeted Hart just the right amount of desperation, humour and pathos. Hart, who died of pneumonia just seven months later, battled alcoholism and depression: struggles that ultimately fractured his partnership with Rodgers. Hawke disappears into the role, his physicality emphasised by a thinning combover and a hunched posture that renders him physically smaller than everyone around him.

What’s remarkable is that Linklater stages almost the entire film in a single location, anchoring the drama on Hart while the world of Broadway, a world war, and shifting cultural tides remain mere footnotes to his singular focus. And Hart wouldn’t have it any other way. While the lyricist’s story has been told before—most notably in the heavily romanticised MGM musical Words and Music, with Mickey Rooney as Hart—few biopics get to the beating heart of a character at a specific moment in time quite as precisely as this.