Ethan Hawke is Masterfully Engaging in Blue Moon

Similar to Rodgers and Hart, Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke goes back nearly 30 years. Now the dynamic duo has reunited at the famous theatre watering hole Sardi’s in 1943. On this historic night, Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) is about to celebrate the opening night  Oklahoma!

As flowers and accolades pour into the restaurant, heralding a new era of American musicals, Hart (Ethan Hawke) holds court at the bar with Eddie, the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and a young, aspiring composer and military officer (Jonah Lees) with stories. His fixation on a 20-year-old Yale student, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he reveres drifts between romantic longing and aesthetic worship.

This film is a tour-de-force performance for Hawke, who is literally delivering a one-man cinematic monologue, with the exception of two fantabulous moments.  One with Scott on the staircase and the other with Qualley where she gently tells Hart “just doesn’t seem him that way.”  Qualley ‘s performance is subtle, yet wonderfully engaging as the unrequited desire of Hart. Andrew Scott is brilliant as a songwriter entering a new, exciting chapter of his songwriting career, yet still attempts while hiding contempt for his former writing partner and simultaneously trying to publicly respect what they created together.  After all, the wonderful thing about art is that it waits for you.

But, Ethan Hawke will hold you in a spell with his portrayal of Lorenz Hart. Short in stature, enormous in satire and struggling with sobriety,  Hawke (as Hart) conveys all the complexities of someone who always loves, but is remiss in loving himself.  Yet, one gets the sense this lyrical genius is a wonderfully prolific storyteller at end of his career.  The lyrical pattern in which Hawke delivers pages and pages of dialogue is uncanny.  Yet, the performance and manner in he wraps his lips around these words is masterful of an actor, much like the man he is playing, at the top of his game directed by one of the best.

In the irony of it all, Hart would collapse eight months later at 48, of pneumonia,  four days after being found shivering in the gutter outside an Eighth Avenue bar he frequented. His legacy beyond hit songs can easily be summed up in the lyrics of the film’s title…

Blue moon
You saw me standin’ alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own