Film Review | Loaded and Lyrical Bar Talk

My already high esteem for Ethan Hawke bumped up a few notches after catching his moving portrayal of tragic jazz legend Chet Baker, in the vastly underrated 2015 Canadian film Born to be Blue. Hawke’s latest triumph finds him deep in the shoes and addled brain of another legendary musician lyricist, Lorenz Hart, in another “blue” film, Blue Moon. Hawke nails both characterizations, with empathy and savvy to suit.

Hart and Baker are both American musical icons with sad life stories and diverse personalities — Baker, the laconic matinee idol felled by drugs and Hart, the acerbically witty partner of Richard Rogers, literally felled by drink. In Blue Moon, we join Hart’s saga at its dismal endpoint, with our protagonist staggering drunkenly in an alley way off of Broadway, in the rain, meeting his untimely finale at age 48. 

Director Richard Linklater’s brilliant one location — Sardi’s — and one night tale, is a refreshing diversion from the tired biopic approach to summing up a great artist’s chronicle. Call it an anti-biopic. Hawke, as the badly combover-donning and diminutive Hart, is very much the darkly eloquent centerpiece of the play-like film, sharply written by Robert Kaplow. But there are larger themes and issues cleverly tucked into the premise. Among those themes is a consideration for that deeply embedded cultural mythology of the Great American Songbook — which the Rodgers and Hart pairing had a huge stake in — and the fragility of art, artists and artistic integrity. 

Much is conveyed, slightly and parenthetically, in this brilliant microcosmic staging. This is not just another night at Sardis, but a pivotal cultural moment in which Hart lurks and holds court in the bar awaiting the post-premiere party for Oklahoma!, the first musical in which Rogers teamed up with another lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II. It’s a tenderized post-divorce moment unfolding, and Hart’s bitterness relates to both Rodgers’ rejection and the shameless sentimental pandering of the new musical — equipped with an anti-subtle exclamation point, no less! 

Linklater’s film is a true marvel of deceptively simple means, taking place in a single evening in a single location, but conveying a vast swath of time and cultural history, even working fellow writer and bar lounger EB White into the story. As a subtle peripheral touch, the resident pianist at Sardi’s (Jonah Lee), who Hart nicknames “Knuckles,” provides a steady but almost subliminal backdrop of period songs — including plenty of Rodgers and Hart classics. It’s the ideal sonic wallpaper for the dramatic occasion.

And yes, the scenario does include a love interest of sorts — or at least a wannabe love interest — in the form of the fetching young protege and social climber (Margaret Qualley, seen in recent Lanthimos films). On this night, Hart clings to the possibility of kindling a deeper relationship, or at least carnal dalliance, with her, almost as a lifeboat for his sinking spirit.

Through it all, Hawke puts in one of his strongest and most Oscar-worthy performances to date. He perfectly embodies the imperfect and dualistic nature of the character, who is narcissistic and yet compassionate, ambiguous in sexual preferences and otherwise neatly fits the archetype of the complicated artistic genius. The two-minded Hart even expresses qualms about his major hit tune “Blue Moon” (call it “Bluer Moon”), but then comes to appreciate it at the end of the day/night/film.

Linklater, whose banner year also included the release of Nouvelle Vague — his brilliant making-of-the-film spin on Godard’s Breathless — has concocted one of the finest cinematic odes to American music to date with Blue Moon. There’s no question by now that this worldly and culture-obsessed Texan is one of the great living American directors, with ears, eyes and mind wide open.

When Blue Moon recently screened as part of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s remarkably star-studded “Cinema Society” events at the Riviera Theatre, Hawke was on hand for a lively post-screening Q&A with SBIFF head Roger Durling. He spoke of the long process of gestation period with the project, starting with the director and actor — longstanding friends and collaborators — liking Kaplow’s script ten years ago. A professor and writer, Kaplow was a friend of both.

Hawke recalls that “it was kind of like a 40 or 50 page poem, a short story about the night that Lorenz Hart attended the opening night of Oklahoma! It was mostly in dialogue. I read it and called Rick up and he said, ‘well, what do you think? I think it’s an incredible piece of writing.’ He said, ‘yeah, but what is it?’ And I said, ‘it’s a Richard Linklater film, and it stars me.’ He said, ‘yeah, I think so too, but you can’t play that part.’ And I was like, ‘why can’t I?’ And he said, ‘because women still wanna sleep with you.’ Let’s wait till you are older.

“That’s quite a friend. Most directors won’t wait four weeks,” Hawke laughed.

Ultimately, the film was shot in 15 days in a bar in Dublin. Hawke appreciates the irony: “we prepped it for ten years and then shot it for 15 days. It’s like being shot from a cannon. And you shoot it in Ireland. In Ireland. It’s supposed to be New York. Luckily, I live in New York. I’ve been to Sardi’s 10,000 times in my life. Bobby (Cannavale) — the guy who played the bartender — is an old friend. We’ve done a couple plays together. We went to Sardi’s and had a drink the night before we flew to Ireland, thinking ‘let’s bring it with us,’” he laughed.

Durling asked about the trend in Hawke’s career of taking on more disparate (and sometimes desperate) characters than previously. The actor noted a turning point when he worked with the late, great Tom Stoppard on the challenging Coast of Utopia on Broadway, which “started pushing the boundaries of what I felt comfortable doing. And then that translated into my film work. If I had a toolkit for performances, basically what Rick was saying was, ‘I don’t want you to use the three tools you always use. I just don’t want to see you. I would do something and the crew would laugh and applaud, and he would just look at me and say ‘I saw you. It’s gotta be Larry. It’s gotta be something I’ve never seen you do.’ And that was very hard.’

“It pushed me to the wall of my talent. I’m smart enough to read the script and go, ‘Wow, a good actor would do something really special with this,’” he laughed. “What would I do with it?”

He does plenty, including accenting a moment when cultural values shifted from the urbane wit and double entendres of his mostly ‘30s-dated era and the coming feelgood qualities of musicals such as Oklahoma!, which Hawke described as a “really pleasant, very enjoyable, delicious fabrication of being nostalgic for a world that never existed. This is something we’re still dealing with, and it sells and it feels really good. Larry’s whole thing is punk. It’s sex, it’s teasing, it’s irony. But Richard Rodgers was not wrong.” 

Wrapping up the Q&A, Hawke spoke about his sympathetic link with Hart’s storyline, as an artist who peaked and faced a life after art (had he not perished in an alley). “As somebody who started really young,” Hawke said, “that’s a huge fear of mine, of being rendered irrelevant and still feeling like you have something to offer. And as somebody who loves cinema, I have that fear of ‘What do we do if cinema is not in style?’

“Now one of the problems is the artists have to make something special enough to demand it. And audiences have to demand it.”

One ripe example of something special currently at the movies: Blue Moon. 

Blue Moon is currently streaming online. View the trailer here.