The lights dim on a Broadway legend

 

 Blue Moon takes a tightly focused look at a humiliating final chapter in the life of Lorenz Hart, the fabled lyricist whose 20-year collaboration with composer Richard Rogers produced such hit tunes as Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, Thou Swell, My Funny Valentine, and Blue Moon. 

  An alcoholic who became a prominent figure in the history of Broadway musicals, Hart died in 1943 at the age of 48. By then his partnership with Rogers, who owed his career to Hart, had deteriorated, and Rogers had begun collaborating with a new partner, Oscar Hammerstein.

   Set on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Blue Moon takes place in Sardi’s, a renowned Theater District restaurant where Rogers, Hammerstein. and other luminaries gather for a post-opening party.

   Embittered wit makes fine fuel for a drama, and Ethan Hawke makes the most of it, continuing a series of movies he has made with director Richard Linklater, notably Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2024), Before Midnight (2013), and the masterwork Boyhood (2014). 

    His hairline pushed to drastic levels of recession, Hawke turns Hart into a witty, talkative, and at times, movingly vulnerable figure who despises Oklahoma!. Hart expresses disdain for any title that requires an exclamation point to assert itself, deriding the show’s romanticized serving of middle-American corn.

     Hawke owns most of the movie’s dialogue, and, in some ways, Blue Moon can be viewed as a monologue with supporting characters, notably the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), who treats Hart’s claims at newfound sobriety with gentle derision. Andrew Scott signs on as Rogers, a composer who makes it clear that Hart’s drunken unreliability ruined their collaboration; and Simon Delaney plays Hammerstein as a man trying his best to be deferential toward a contemptuous Hart.

      But the key supporting role belongs to Margaret Qualley, who appears as Elizabeth Weiland, a 20-year-old Yale student who becomes an intoxicating love interest for the bisexual Hart, who — in this telling — turns her into a kind of redemptive presence who could love him in a way that no one else ever had. That's what he wants.

       Qualley’s performance reveals a student who  appreciates Hart’s genius, but also sees him as a stepping stone for a career in the theater. In a lengthy confession to Hart about how she spent the night of her 20th birthday, Elizabeth rejects the lyricist in a way that’s devastating to him, all the worse because her dismissal is couched in admiration and respect.

        Like many of the moments in Blue Moon, the scene brings Hart's humiliation into painful focus.   Hawke makes us understand that despite his self-aggrandizing pronouncements, Hart realizes the pathetic state into which he had fallen.

       Considering Hart’s theatrical background and the movie’s narrow focus, I wondered whether Blue Moon might not have worked better as a play. Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly mostly defeat the limitations of a single-setting story dominated by a character whose ability to annoy others sometimes spills off the screen, irritating us.

      Still, Blue Moon showcases a memorable Hawke performance as Hart marinates his talent in bitterness and rue. Hart, by the way, says he hates Blue Moon -- the song, not the movie -- which became one of his most popular creations.