Without a dream in your heart
Without a love of your own.
What an apt description for legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the evening of March 31, 1943 when he arrives solo to Sardi’s Bar, first avoiding having to watch the entirety of the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma!, and then having to endure the musical’s unbridled success as his former collaborator Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein II gather to celebrate, with an entourage of adoring fans.
The script of Blue Moon, especially Hart’s acerbic monologues, mimics the theatricality—one might argue, the artifice—of the stage, sometimes seeming impossibly witty, but Ethan Hawke owns the words and delivers an intriguing performance rife with physicality (cleverly shortened and made bald) and unlike anything I’ve seen from him before, converting what might have been a stereotyped characterization of an effete discrete homosexual into a pitiable human being decimated by his own addictions and self-denials. Self-destruction has rarely been so poignant, if not honestly pathetic.
It's not only Hart’s alcoholism that has run him aground and lost him his professional associations, but an idealized infatuation with protégé Elizabeth Wieland (in a gangly yet boyishly attractive turn by Margaret Qualley) that has him untethered to reality, adrift in an unfortunate and embarrassing bout of internalized homophobia.
With restrained compassion and a lean masculinity contrasted against Hart’s venomous and barbed tongue and exaggerated mannerisms, Andrew Scott’s portrayal of composer Richard Rodgers, earned him a well-deserved Silver Bear win for Best Supporting Actor at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival.
The film takes some dramaturgical license in creating the presumption that the conditions for Hart’s well-publicized death—his lying drunk and collapsed in an alley in the rain, resulting in his eventual death from pneumonia—occurred after the Sardi’s event when, in fact, it occurred months later after Hart and Rodgers had reunited and created a revival of “A Connecticut Yankee”, their successful musical from 1927; a negotiation suggested by Rodgers in Blue Moon. Regardless of the exact date, Hart’s loneliness and alcoholism determined his inevitable demise.
Blue Moon screened at the 48th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival and has since opened theatrically at multiple theaters around the Bay Area, and is now playing at The Flicks in Boise, Idaho.
