Isn’t it romantic? Just a few days after February 14th, the Berlinale delivered its own funny valentine to American songbook legend Lorenz Hart with the World Premiere of Richard Linklater’s beautifully melancholic Blue Moon.
In a virtuoso performance, Ethan Hawke stars as the famous (and famously tortured) lyricist still suffering the sting of his recent estrangement from composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). Set entirely on March 31, 1943—only a few months before Hart would die from pneumonia at age 48—Blue Moon takes place during the premiere of Oklahoma!, the new musical from the newly minted duo of Rogers and Lorenz’s replacement lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.
Hart is gutted, of course, and watches Oklahoma! with bitter distain before leaving its Broadway premiere early, sulking off for a whiff of whiskey and some kibbitzing with Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) at Sardi’s, which soon will be hosting the musical’s Opening Night party.
“It’s a 14-carat hit,” Hart sniffs. “And a 14-carat piece of shit.” He despises the cornpone Americana in Oklahoma!—not to mention the emphatically hokey exclamation point in its title—while recognizing that it’s the kind of inoffensive art that high schools will enthusiastically re-stage for decades to come. And he fears that his professional life is over. So long, Rogers and Hart—a wildly fruitful partnership that lasted 24 years and produced 1,000 songs for more than two dozen musicals along with countless Hollywood hits before Hart’s alcoholism caused such erratic and arrogant behavior that it sabotaged their relationship.
Blue Moon is Linklater’s character study of Hart, set almost entirely in one location and featuring Hawke in every scene as the manic, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing, wildly wounded and hopelessly longing wordsmith. Through old-fashioned movie magic, the 5’ 10” blue-eyed actor is also literally reduced in the film to match Lorenz’s diminutive stature (less than five feet tall), as well as his dark and balding complexion (brown eyes, aggressive comb-over).
Hart’s lyrics for swoony standards like “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and “Falling in Love with Love” reveal a man who’s smitten with being smitten, so much so that he’s attracted to both men and women. “I’m omnisexual,” he declares, although most women think he’s gay and respond to his overtures with the wounding friend-zone remark “I love you—just not in that way.”
His latest object of desire: 20-year-old Yalie Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whose emerald eyes, bottle-blonde hair, and “appealingly ethereal” face have him besotted. He has an epistolary rapport with her that he thinks is evidence of something more. And her presence at the party will be his time to consummate his feelings for her. But what will bring him more pain—Elizabeth or his old songwriting buddy?
What makes this intimate film truly sing are the demands of Robert Kaplow’s original screenplay: essentially one location, with a main character who drives every single conversation with all the other characters. It’s a unique creative challenge for both the director and his main star, both of whom first came to Berlin thirty years ago with their first collaboration, Before Sunrise—which won Linklater the Silver Bear for Best Director.
“Lorenz Hart is the ultimate lyricist of unfulfilled love,” said Linklater at the film’s press conference the day Blue Moon debuted. “It’s more poignant. The film is about relationships and art but it’s also about love and its complexities.”
“What Robert Kaplow wrote for us was an absolutely beautiful script,” said Hawke. “It’s basically a film that’s one scene. To have that simplicity, but to make the verbiage come alive, to make its musical quality. When is it fast? When is it slow? When is it arresting, when is it heartbreaking, when is it silly? How can it keep changing? It takes a long time to understand the dynamics at play.”
But what made Hawke fall in love with the script was Kaplow’s three-dimensional portrait of Hart. “This character that Robert created has so many opposites,” Hawke said. “That’s what really turned me on about it. He’s very small and he’s huge. He’s a lover and he’s lonely. He’s deeply insecure and wildly confident. I could say I prepared by shaving my head and listening to Lorenz Hart songs. But that’s not really the truth.”
What impressed Scott was reading a script that made Rodgers just as vulnerable and wounded, in his own way, as Hart. Throughout the film the two have conversations that are so pregnant with emotion and history that their words bleed pain. “You’re having these stolen moments of heartbreaks and lust and love and bitterness and real affection happening,” Scott said. “How do you conduct a conversation like that during the opening night of one for the biggest musicals ever produced?”
More than anything, Blue Moon is not so much about romantic love as it is about platonic love. “For many of us, the biggest loves of our lives are our friendships,” said Scott. “And this friendship was born out of work. And I love the idea that this is sort of a workplace film.”
“It’s strange to watch a movie about heartbreak when everyone is actually trying to be kind,” said Hawke. “One of the things that I really love about Richard Linklater’s films is that they love people. And these hearts are getting broken, but people are all being kind to one another. Or they’re trying. And we still get hurt. And I find that kind of profound.”
<