BLUE MOON (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Blue Moon, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 17, 2025

About eight months after the central event of Blue Moon, Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), the writer of multiple showtunes that became American standards, will be dead at the age of 48. That's the first thing we learn in Richard Linklater's sharply observed film, from a literate screenplay by Robert Kaplow, after watching Lorenz—"Larry" to his friends—stumble down an alley in the rain, drunkenly murmuring to himself before falling to the ground.

That essentially makes the primary story of the film an extended eulogy of sorts, in which this interpretation of Hart is portrayed as an intelligent, charming man who knows all of his flaws, foibles, and shortcomings but indulges in them anyway. The setting, a party for the opening of his former creative partner's new musical with a different collaborator, certainly doesn't help.

Some background, perhaps, is necessary, if only because the world of theater is one that a person either knows or doesn't go out of the way to think about in the slightest. Kaplow's screenplay is wise enough to present all of the information that latter category needs to know, while also being clever enough not to go overboard on exposition for the audience members in the former category.

Musical theater in the United States has its music-and-lyrics pairings, and arguably, the most famous of them all is the collaboration between (Richard) Rodgers and (Oscar) Hammerstein, whose shows are, as Lorenz accurately predicts with a bit of both envy and subtle critique, still performed decades after they were first produced—a lot of times in high schools, as the film's Lorenz also adds to the sharper edge of his compliment of the duo's first project.

That one was Oklahoma!—complete with the exclamation point that Lorenz cannot abide, as he sits at the bar at Sardi's down the street from the theater where the musical's premiere is about to finish. He was watching from a box seat with his mother, but enough of the singing-and-dancing cowpokes, after seeing previews for the show a few times before this, is more than enough for the man.

Most of this is bitterness, which Lorenz is quick to admit privately, because before it was Rodgers and Hammerstein, it was Rodgers and Hart, who had many hits of their own. None of them, it seems from the audience at the premiere, will stand the test of time in the way Lorenz suspects Oklahoma! will. If that's the case with the duo's first effort, what other timeless musicals will his longtime friend and writing partner create with the new guy? The answer is plenty, and while Lorenz—as we know from that prologue—won't live long enough to see that, he seems to know it to his very core, on this very night, and with all of the questions it raises about his own career and legacy very much on his mind.

This actually happened, by the way, on March 31, 1943, although Kaplow has to use his imagination for most of what Hart must have said, done, and thought at the famous restaurant in the heart of New York City's theaters, where autographed caricatures of famous patrons line the walls. When Lorenz tries to explain to a man delivering flowers that young man is right to recognize his name, he tries to point to his own portrait on the wall, but it is no longer in its usual spot. Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), the friendly bartender who knows the lyricist—too well, perhaps—from his many times drinking at this spot, says they move the pictures around regularly.

However, the truth, beyond the fact that any good bartender knows to keep the customer as happy as possible, isn't revealed until the film's final moments. If Lorenz knew, he would probably have started the despairing contemplation, not to mention the drinking, much earlier in the evening.

Watching all of this unfold in the film is equally entertaining, because it is about smart and self-aware people talking to each other with intelligence and understanding, and filled with anguish, because we know Lorenz's fate and witness as it is basically etched in stone on this night. The man has made many promises to himself before arriving at Sardi's. He will woo Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), his 20-year-old protégé, after many months of trying to bed her, as well as a lifetime of publicly hiding his sexual attraction to men. He will be professional and gracious when his creative partner arrives for a party after the curtains close down the block.

Most importantly, Lorenz will do this and be his charming self without drinking any alcohol. The drinking, as his colleague will remind Lorenz later, is the main reason he wanted—maybe needed—to find a different collaborator. By the way, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers in a performance of surgical precision, cutting to the core of how and why his patience has and continues to run out for his old friend in only three brief scenes or so.

Apart from the script and Linklater's stagy direction, the film belongs to Hawke, who is almost unrecognizable (especially since there's some strange trickery to make the actor look as diminutive in stature as the real Hart supposedly was—and the fictional version feels when he considers himself) and provides the sense of a man's downfall happening in real time. Nothing goes according to plan. Elizabeth shows up with the story of young man she has been pursuing. Richard, Oscar (Simon Delaney), and a large assembly of people, waiting to applaud and cheer all the rave reviews for the show coming in, arrive, and Lorenz says one positive thing that sounds genuine, before the desperation and resentment can't be hidden.

Inevitably, the drinks come, as Lorenz commiserates about writing with E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), humors an Army man (played by Jonah Lees) on leave playing the piano and wanting to meet Richard, and escapes the crowd to return to the bar. Calling Linklater's direction of Blue Moon "stagy," by the way, was intended as compliment. That shot of Lorenz's retreat in particular shows how well the filmmaker blocks and frames his actors within this limited space, especially in how Lorenz looks as small and lonely as he imagines himself to be. He knows the end is coming, and we feel it for him, too.

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