This awards season, director Richard Linklater has two big films coming out that imagine interactions behind the scenes of major artistic watersheds. Opening in a few weeks, he has Nouvelle Vague, about the birth of the French New Wave that began with Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Breathless. The other ‘25 Linklater film is Blue Moon, which focuses on Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma! on Broadway. Both of these occasions changed the world of dramatic arts forever.
The hook of Blue Moon is the focus on Hart. Lorenz Hart wrote lyrics for Richard Rodgers for over twenty years, producing many American standards, including the song which gives this movie its title. Like most writers, Hart was a self-loathing alcoholic, and his reckless and unprofessional behavior ended up ruining both his career and his life.
When Rodgers started the show that would become Oklahoma!, Hart balked at the material. Already fed up with Hart’s unpredictable and erratic behavior, Rodgers chose a new lyricist to work with: Oscar Hammerstein II. Hammerstein’s book and lyrics are the main reason that Oklahoma! has henceforth been credited with ushering in the true American musical. In the twenties and thirties, Broadway shows were not far removed from the vaudville revues that birthed them. Hammerstein brought psychological complexity to the form and started the move from the loosely connected song showcases of the time to the form we are all familiar with. Instead of isolated production numbers, the new musicals used the songs to reveal character and advance the plot. It was the most important moment in the form’s history.
And Lorenz Hart had nothing to do with it.
Stung by Rodgers’s immediate success with his successor and bitter that his style of writing had gone out of fashion seemingly overnight, Hart never recovered from Oklahoma!’s success and died in a drunken collapse eight months later.
Blue Moon imagines the night that broke Lorenz Hart’s spirit. After seeing the play, he rushes to the bar at Sardi’s to hold forth on the travesty of Oklahoma! and the bigger travesty that it will clearly be a masssive success. The film takes place in real time at the bar, where Hart rolls out his endless sardonic wit to the bartender, piano player, and hat-check girl. He runs into E. B. White, clings to Rodgers when he and Hammerstein enter with their fawning fans, and rhapsodizes about a young woman named Elizabeth Weiland, with whom he is madly in love. Even little Stevie Sondheim has a part as Hammerstein’s twelve-year-old protégé!
The film is, in one sense, a long monologue by Hart as he fights to retain his relevance in the eyes of a series of people from a spectrum of social levels. The script is marvelous! It would be inexact to call it “sparkling,” but only because of its underlying melancholy. Hart is written with amazing depth and shallowness as he acts as a walking wisecrack just noticing that the rest of its self has died. His interactions with an embarrassed but concerned Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and the chic succubus Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) are painful, as he debases himself in hopes of their approval. His banter with the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) is a kind of frenetic self-deception. And yet it is all bathed in real humor, pathos, and theatre geek easter eggs.
Hart himself is played by Ethan Hawke in what may be (along with his current FX series, The Lowdown) his best acting work yet. Famously short and balding, Hart is not an obvious character for Hawke to play, but he manages to look the part by shaving his head and using height-altering slight-of-camera tricks. Hawke’s acting style is one that always builds on his own personality and mannerisms, but here he must erase every vestige of himself in service of the part, and the transformation is impressive.
Blue Moon is a good example in my ongoing crusade in favor of historical inaccuracy. More correctly stated, I argue against the assertion that historical accuracy is of universal and paramount importance. Writing is about giving the sense of what happened more than the facts of what transpired. It is unlikely that E. B. White was at Sardi’s that night and perhaps even more unlikely that Hart was. We know Sondheim did not attend the Oklahoma! premiere, and all that exists to prove Elizabeth Weiland’s existence are some unearthed letters passed between her and Hart. And yet, by selecting and arranging these elements, the screenwriter (Robert Kaplow) manages to show us the last days of Lorenz Hart in only 100 minutes.
This is the best time to go to the cinema, when my favorite film of the year is unseated again and again as new masterpieces come out. Sinners, Anemone, One Battle After Another—make way for Blue Moon as it rises to the top of my list. I can’t wait to see what will top it. Perhaps it will be Linklater’s second film of the year. Who knows.