 |
| Festival du Nouveau Cinéma |
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon moves like the smoke curling from a half-finished cigarette—its beauty resides in evanescence, in the ache of what’s leaving even as it lingers. At first glance, this is the story of Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who gave the American songbook its bruised romanticism and bitter humor, and who died, alone and drunk, four days after collapsing on the streets of New York. Yet Linklater’s new film refuses the consolations of biographical closure. It is not about Hart’s end but about his exquisite unraveling—his soul caught between the jazz of his own wit and the deafening silence that follows disillusionment.
The year is 1943, the night Oklahoma! opens and Broadway’s consciousness changes forever. Down the street from the theater, in Sardi’s, where caricatures of the greats adorn the walls like secular saints, Hart (Ethan Hawke) is drinking himself into an elegy. Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), once his collaborator and now half of the newly canonized Rodgers and Hammerstein, is celebrating what will become the next great American myth. Between them, the bar becomes a confessional—a liminal space where genius and self-destruction meet, where creation and self-loathing perform a pas de deux that feels as old as art itself.
Linklater, whose cinema has always pulsed to the rhythm of human conversation, uses Blue Moon to transform talk into ritual. The film unfolds almost entirely in real time, within the dim amber of Sardi’s, and it does so with an audacity that feels both theatrical and sacramental. His camera, guided by Shane F. Kelly’s meticulous fluidity, drifts among the bodies like a spirit uncertain where to rest. What emerges is not a biography but a séance: the summoning of a man who composed love songs he could not live.
TRAILER you can see this delicious at Université Concordia - Auditorium SGWUA Friday, October 17, 2025 - 6:00 PM — 7:45 PM tickets here
Andrew Scott, winning his Silver Bear for good reason, gives Rodgers the stillness of a man who has made peace with convention. His performance is all restraint and private disappointment; he plays success as a kind of prison. When the two men meet—one ascending toward immortality, the other descending toward oblivion—their exchange becomes a philosophical duel. Rodgers represents the stability of discipline, Hart the chaos of feeling. Linklater refuses to romanticize either. Instead, he positions them as two halves of a single creative organism, torn apart by the impossibility of living within one another’s truth.
What Blue Moon understands, and what so few films about artists dare to explore, is that genius often resides in the shadow—those internal caverns where desire festers and beauty is born from shame. Linklater has always been a filmmaker of time and conversation, but here he becomes a theologian of failure. His direction invites us not to pity Hart but to witness him as a mirror of our own avoidance, our desperate attempts to outtalk pain. The film asks: what happens when the persona that once protected you becomes the last mask you can’t remove?
The answer arrives not in narrative but in rhythm. Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, as fine-tuned as one of Hart’s own couplets, weaves together humor, cruelty, and yearning with a precision that feels musical. Conversations spiral and double back, laughter punctures sorrow, and the entire film seems to breathe in sync with Hart’s erratic pulse. This is shadow work disguised as banter—a man performing his undoing for an audience too polite to intervene. Linklater’s structure, cyclical and claustrophobic, mimics the way despair repeats itself until it becomes ritual.
Margaret Qualley, as Elizabeth Weiland, embodies Hart’s impossible longing for a purity he cannot inhabit. She plays Elizabeth not as muse but as mirror: youthful, intellectually alive, both drawn to and wary of his intensity. Their scenes are the film’s quietest heartbreaks. When she says, “I love you, just not in that way,” the line lands with the weight of Greek tragedy. It is not rejection but revelation: love cannot rescue us from the self we refuse to see.
What gives Blue Moon its rare power is Linklater’s refusal to aestheticize Hart’s ruin. The film’s beauty never lapses into indulgence. The compositions are restrained, the lighting disciplined, the performances grounded in a realism that resists nostalgia. Even as it inhabits the mythic glamour of midcentury Broadway, Blue Moon dismantles the illusion that art’s grandeur absolves its creators from the moral labor of living. Linklater, ever the patient humanist, locates the divine not in the applause of the audience but in the silence after the final song—the moment when one must face oneself without melody or mask.
There is a moral dimension to the film that feels almost monastic. In its stillness, Blue Moon becomes an invitation to reckon with the spiritual cost of creation, with the loneliness that attends self-awareness. It is not content to observe change; it demands regeneration. By the end, when Hart stares at his own reflection in a half-empty whiskey glass, what we see is not merely a broken man but the ghost of an entire cultural mythology—the myth of the suffering artist, reexamined and laid bare. The film dares its viewers to question why we venerate self-destruction as authenticity, why we still mistake confession for freedom.
In its way, Blue Moon proposes a new paradigm for human connection. The bar at Sardi’s becomes a microcosm of community—imperfect, transient, sustained only by conversation and fleeting empathy. Each character, from the weary bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale, earthy and kind) to the young Stephen Sondheim cameo, embodies a fragment of collective consciousness. They orbit Hart’s implosion like witnesses at a sacred, private funeral for the old Broadway, for the age when genius and loneliness were twin virtues. Linklater’s camera watches without judgment. In this refusal, the film achieves something like grace.
Graham Reynolds’ score hums quietly beneath the dialogue, more pulse than melody. It recalls the interior soundscape of Boyhood or Before Midnight: music as atmosphere, not punctuation. It supports the film’s central paradox—that stillness, too, can sing. By the time the title song arrives, played almost reluctantly on the bar’s dusty piano, it feels less like a standard than a requiem. “Blue Moon” becomes a lament not only for Hart but for the part of us that confuses brilliance with worth, irony with protection.
Linklater’s art has always been sustainable in the truest sense: rooted in observation rather than spectacle, in the long patience of listening. Blue Moon continues that discipline. It does not devour its subject for catharsis; it nourishes him with compassion. The film’s endurance will not lie in its period detail or awards-season buzz, but in its quiet insistence that the act of seeing another human being—truly seeing them—is itself revolutionary.
When the camera finally pans upward, catching the caricatures of Rodgers and Hart side by side on Sardi’s wall, the gesture feels neither ironic nor sentimental. It feels like absolution. Between those two drawn faces—one smiling with satisfaction, the other smirking in eternal self-defense—Linklater places the audience. He asks whether we, too, can forgive ourselves for surviving, for creating, for failing.
In the end, Blue Moon is not a biographical comedy-drama but a meditation on the sacred art of being unfinished. It reminds us that emotional honesty is not a performance but a practice, that vulnerability is not weakness but proof of life. Linklater and Hawke, long-time collaborators in the cinematic study of time, have here composed something rarer than nostalgia: a requiem for illusion, sung in the minor key of grace.
It is a film that leaves you hushed, as if you have overheard the soul whispering to itself. In that silence—fragile, luminous, unadorned—Blue Moon finds what every great work of art seeks: not redemption, but truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment