Mill Valley Film Festival 2025: 'Blue Moon' Isn't a Rarity, But Hawke Does Shine

Bald caps give performers a lot of confidence. Uniformly, any sort of application that helps an actor modify or shroud their typical appearance allots that actor a boundless space in which to play. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is the result of a well-tended-to actor being given more than ample space to create, as actors do. It is also the result of a bald cap.

Linklater and Hawke have collaborated on five films prior to Blue Moon and have been jointly nominated at the Academy Awards for three. These men have a thirty-year long cinematic history with each other spanning marriages, divorces and a start and end to their Before Trilogy, co-starring (and the latter two co-written with) Julie Delpy. The duo’s rich past lends Blue Moon an inherent sweetness that nearly makes up for its meandering manner and impishly assumed wit that exhausts more than it delights, with little commendable form to dazzle in that wit’s absence.

Blue Moon follows Hart, stationed at New York’s famous Sardi’s bar, on March 31, 1943, the opening night of Oklahoma!. It is Richard Rodgers’s first collaboration with his soon-to-be most iconic partner, Oscar Hammerstein II, after years working with Hart. Hart wastes the night away yammering with his reluctant steady-hand bartender while playing two waiting games. One game is directed toward Rodgers, who is coming to the Sardi’s afterparty, and for whom Hart must put on a brave face, free of contempt. The other source of anticipation is his alleged muse, a verbose young woman named Elizabeth, who’s popping by the party and desperately wants to meet Rodgers.

Fashioned as a true talkie, with a script that surely matches the film’s runtime in page count, Blue Moon is a throwback of sorts, certainly a love letter to an obvious temporal obsession of Linklater’s – that of the midcentury New York that birthed the showtune-cum-great-American-songbook standards, mostly at the hands of Hart and Rodgers. Linklater and writer Robert Kaplow’s doting upon the era is warmly felt in the lovingly detailed recreation of 1943’s Sardi’s, particularly in its overwhelming number of little jabs at the zeitgeist of the time, peaking with a coy tease at a midcentury peer’s “next great work” that rivals Oppenheimer’s “junior senator from Kentucky” levels of self-satisfaction. 

In the eye of this storm lies Hawke’s performance as Hart, which is a tour de force by any definition of the phrase. Hawke’s Hart is indefatigable, by another word, and unmanageable, by definition. A sad drunk whose wit knows no end and whose liver must pull double-time to make up for the minimal space between sentences, Hart’s fate is set from the opening shot where he crumples into a New York street, boozed up and dying, mere hours on from that moment and mere months from when the bulk of the film takes place. Hawke’s meek stature as Hart, shrunk with movie magic, is still an effect of performance and one that imbues his overwrought gestures and overstuffed digressions with a sharp bittersweet pang. He jumps from tirade to tirade against the tyrannical powers that be, the ones who, imagined or real, are to be blamed for his lack of further success in New York. 

Kaplow’s script is as verbose as Hart was, or was thought to be, yet Hawke makes a meal of it with his trademarked earnestness serving as his ace. The Gen X icon’s heart-on-sleeve persona in life and on screen can be interpreted as grating, yet, when aptly applied, as by a friend and collaborator like Linklater, Hawke shines as bright as any star lighting up Broadway – even if his Hart is the furthest thing from that grace in the two hours we get to know him. With that shining bald cap, those darkened contacts, and a Middle Earth-ified height, Hawke lets loose upon the mile-a-minute dialogue being fed to him and, most graciously, bounces off his co-stars with mutual kineticism. 

Surrounding Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley all turn in performances from different movies, or plays, or miniseries. Tonal discordance drives the ensemble, a symptom of Linklater’s scattershot focus between faithful execution of script and enamorment with his players, but Hawke glues every crooked jigsaw piece together. The soaring highs of the film are his moments with Scott’s Richard Rodgers, who comes floating into the film and its Sardi’s like a king on air. Though he too airs his anxieties – mainly over Oklahoma! reviews, a foregone conclusion for most audiences – Rodgers, calm and collected and standing tall, is the antithesis to Hart’s wired overperformances of praise that shroud his bitterness. Pitterpatter between Hawke and Scott lights the film up and edges toward its most potent emotionality.

Sadder yet is Hart’s pure infatuation with Qualley’s Elizabeth, a dynamic that’s not necessarily a one-way street, but certainly not one close to materializing any new digits. A self-proclaimed omnisexual and often dubbed highly-closeted Hart loves, or covets, Elizabeth, while she finds him mirthful. One key scene between them illustrates, rather didactically, the film as a whole. She spins a yarn to a rapt Hart, one of a not-so-glamourous sexual escapade that nonetheless exemplifies the possibilities of youth. He’s willingly stuck himself down to listen to it, to her, and he’s enraptured. Out of joy? Longing? Jealousy? Pity? He doesn’t really know, but she enjoys telling him and he likes hearing it and that’s that. Onto the next.

Blue Moon has little to offer but its lead, who gives his all toward a friend’s project, leaving nothing on the table. It’s a greedy yet selfless performance, one that calibrates every syllable and flick of the wrist, as Hart may have, yet never threatens to overwhelm the screen or burn its co-stars. Hawke’s daring-do and generosity are one and the same, eager and overactive while stirring all the same and well worth the price of admission. Blue Moon is Linklater’s stage, and its purpose is to serve a radiant star who has little else to give beyond a blistering passion. What’s more Broadway than that?

Blue Moon opens in limited release on Oct. 17 and expands Oct. 24.

-August