As an adolescent with basic cable in the pre-streaming era, I often found myself watching snippets of unidentified films on Turner Classic Movies. Only one has stayed with me: the end of what I would eventually come to learn was the 1948 film Words and Music, a biographical musical about Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In the final scene, Hart, played by Mickey Rooney, sneaks out of a hospital to watch a musical before staggering out into the rain and dying.
At the time, I really didn’t know what I had watched. But I knew enough about Frank Sinatra to know that Rodgers and Hart had a lot of entries in the Great American Songbook. I knew enough about musical theater to know that Richard Rodgers would go on to become half of Rodgers and Hammerstein. And I knew that, despite the schmaltz of the last scene, Larry Hart must have been really messed up if they made a Hays Code movie about him expiring in a gutter not long after he actually died.
I can’t say I’ve spent much time thinking about Hart since then, but that scene was one of the many things on my mind after seeing Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. The film, which stars Ethan Hawke as Hart, takes place on the opening night of Oklahoma!, Rodgers’s smash hit with Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist who replaced Hart as the legendary composer’s other half.
Blue Moon is 100 minutes long, has five people in its principal cast, and takes place entirely on the first floor of Sardi’s in Manhattan. That, combined with the fact that Sony Pictures Classics distributed the movie, feels like the setup for a claustrophobic art film. But Blue Moon is expansive, goofy, and heart-wrenching. Like a classic Rodgers and Hart tune, it does a lot with a little and leaves you shocked at what it makes you feel in such a short period of time.
The film opens where Words and Music ends: with Hart dying in the rain. Unlike its predecessor, there’s no mistaking what we’re seeing here: a drunken loner meeting his sad demise.
This prologue lasts just a moment, before we see Hart, seven months earlier, leaving the opening night of Oklahoma! and strolling into a bar, empty save for Eddie, a delightfully piquant bartender played by Bobby Cannavale. It quickly becomes clear that Hart had asked Eddie not to serve him: he’s on the wagon. Over the course of the night, he’ll have seven drinks.
In between drinks, Hart mostly talks: to Eddie, to the piano player, to a solitary tippler in the corner who turns out to be E.B. White. He keeps looking at the door, anxiously awaiting the arrival of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old coed with whom he’s become infatuated, and of Rodgers (Andrew Scott), whose triumphant entrance with Hammerstein, he knows, will mark the end of their 25-year partnership. Elizabeth arrives, as does Rodgers. They both reject Hart. The former’s rejection is nicer than the latter’s; the latter’s is considerably more gutwrenching.
That’s the plot of Blue Moon. But to say that’s what the movie is about is like saying 1954’s Ulysses is about Leopold Bloom bumming around Dublin to avoid catching his wife in flagrante. It’s true, but it misses the point. Blue Moon is ultimately, to borrow from Joyce again, the portrait of an artist on the verge of his sad demise. What makes it brilliant is that it is somehow universal and particular at the same time.
Sure, you could read a lot into the character of Larry — insecure, closeted, craving affection, fighting to cling to what’s left of his career — there’s certainly plenty of fodder for that type of interpretation. Elizabeth, though apparently based on a real correspondent of Hart’s, is a perfect cinematic pastiche, simultaneously the unattainable object of affection, a female stand-in for Rodgers, and a symbol of the purity and optimism that the cynical and tainted Hart always craved but never found.
Though the film technically takes place across the first floor of Sardi’s, Hart always remains in the bar, the lowest level. He never really enters the opening night party across the floor. He gets close while talking to Rodgers, literally holding his partner back — from the party, from the adoring guests trying to greet him, from the producer reading out positive reviews. He repeats this performance later, on the staircase up to where the party has migrated. Rodgers puts the final nail in their coffin while standing on the landing in front of a poster for Show Boat (lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II), before walking up and out of Hart’s life forever. Hart never makes it to the party.
So, if you feel compelled to analyze or make a symbol out of the man who wrote “My Funny Valentine,” you certainly can. But you don’t have to, because Blue Moon is also a first-rate biopic. The 5’10” Hawke employs all manner of tricks to appear as diminutive as the 5’0” Hart. Scott manages to convey Rodgers’s notorious lecherousness without a single line of dialogue, but plenty of lingering glances at the women in the room. The film has many historical, musical, and theatrical Easter Eggs that will delight those who recognize them.
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That doesn’t mean, however, that missing the references will detract from the movie, no more than ignoring the subtext will. More than an allegory or history, Blue Moon is a flawless portrait of a man in a moment. It is captivating and evocative because Linklater so perfectly portrays reality. Credit is also due to Hawke, who, despite shrinking himself and affecting a voice and playing a fool, pulls off a performance so earnest and emotional that it’s hard to describe.
I usually try to end reviews with some kind of grand thematic point. But not this time. Blue Moon doesn’t need to be intellectualized or generalized. It’s a phenomenal film, a triumph of performance and direction. I haven’t stopped thinking about it — or humming the titular tune — since leaving the theatre. Go see this movie. You won’t regret it.
Tim Rice is the Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Daily Wire.