Blue Moon: Tragicomedy about Broadway lyricist strikes a chord

Just like a good Rodgers and Hart song, this lovely little tragicomedy from director Richard Linklater and scripter Robert Kaplow is both irresistibly catchy — it hums with pure cinematic pleasure — and deeply melancholy.

Blue Moon is a fast, witty drama of ideas, packed with exhilarating talk about love, desire, friendship and art. It’s also an emotionally affecting character study, grounded in a remarkable, possibly career-best performance from frequent Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke.

Hawke (whose work with Linklater includes the Before trilogy and Boyhood) plays Lorenz (Larry) Hart, the lyricist who finally made “American songs sound like American speech,” as one character suggests.

We meet him in 1943 on what could be the worst night of his life, as the legendary songwriting duo “Rodgers and Hart” is replaced by “Rodgers and Hammerstein.”

Exasperated with his longtime creative partner’s heavy drinking and erratic behaviour, Richard Rodgers, known as Dick (Andrew Scott of All of Us Strangers), has started to work instead with Oscar Hammerstein II (Lockerbie’s Simon Delaney), and the pair’s debut collaboration, Oklahoma!, has just opened on Broadway.

Audiences are ecstatic, the reviews are stellar, and Larry is at Sardi’s, that legendary showbiz hangout, being gloriously bitchy about the title’s punctuation.

“Any title that feels the need for an exclamation point, you want to steer clear of,” he tells long-suffering, seen-it-all bartender Eddy (Bobby Cannavale of The Watcher).

Dismissing the work as a humourless, overemphatic piece of American cornpone, Larry is also honest enough to concede that it’s going to be huge hit.

“It’s so … inoffensive,” he explains, with a flash of malice.

Waiting for Dick and Oscar and the theatregoers to trickle in for an opening-night party, Larry holds forth at the bar, in a mix of long confessional monologues and breezy back-and-forths with Eddy and Morty (Superman’s Jonah Lees), the young piano player.

He’s also nervously awaiting the entrance of Elizabeth (The Substance’s Margaret Qualley). The 47-year-old Larry, who describes himself as “omnisexual, ambisexual,” is a closeted queer man who impetuously proposes to women from time to time, and he’s recently become irrationally giddy about a 20-year-old college girl.

This all takes place over the course of one imagined evening, within the smoky confines of Sardi’s, with its red leather banquettes and mahogany bar. Linklater being a director who loves a chatty film, it’s almost all Larry talking.

“Did you ever think your life was a play?” Eddy asks at one point. And clearly Larry has thought this, as suggested by Hawke’s flamboyantly theatrical performance.

There’s an understated emotional realism here as well, though, as all that theatricality can be seen as an elaborate defence mechanism. Larry might be a mess of showy declamations, sardonically funny asides and outrageous vanity, but Hawke balances this with glints of vulnerability and a bleak, funny streak of self-awareness.

Hawke’s work is counterpointed by the strong supporting performances. Qualley shimmers delicately between being the ethereal goddess of Larry’s poetic imagination and an ordinary callow kid. Scott gives us a cool, contained take on Dick Rodgers, while helping us understand the long friendship and complicated creative process that connects these two very different men.

Then there are brief (fictionalized) encounters with such real-life figures as New Yorker essayist and beloved children’s author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy from The Day of the Jackal). (Larry gives him an idea for his next book.) A 12-year-old Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan) pops up, precocious and already full of opinions about Hart’s lyrics (“a little sloppy”).

Scripter Kaplow (Me and Orson Welles) is both emotionally generous and sharply insightful, and Linklater leans into the film’s tight parameters with craft and commitment.

And while Blue Moon, from Morty’s piano stylings to Larry’s Broadway in-jokes, might seem made for musical theatre kids, it should also speak to anyone who’s ever experienced longing and loss.

As Larry would say, “Really, who’s ever been loved half enough?”

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca