Few American actors are better at playing idealistic young dreamers than Ethan Hawke, and his characters have matured gracefully along with him.
They’re still full of wanderlust or pent-up creative energy, only now it’s tempered by experience and the errors of their ways. Now that Hawke is well into middle age, along with the rest of Generation X, he can provide a more nuanced approach than his earlier roles invited.
When we first meet Hawke as legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon,” he’s lying down in a rain-swept alley, clearly on the brink of death. Alone, as he famously wrote, without a dream in his heart.
We then rewind to a few months earlier, and we learn how, over the course of a single evening, Hart and heart alike were both shattered. Director Richard Linklater’s film proceeds to weave an engrossing spell on the viewer, but it’s Hawke’s performance that ultimately binds it all together.
The lyricist stumbles into Sardi’s Restaurant, and the bartender (a wonderful Bobby Cannavale) aims a gun at him. It’s a private joke that they’ve laughed along with many times.
Lorenz starts to talk, sometimes playing off the bartender, the GI playing the piano and various people entering the restaurant. At other times he’s talking to no one in particular, just hoping someone hears him speak.
“Oklahoma!” has just opened on Broadway and “Larry” Hart is understandably resentful of his former partner Richard Rodgers’s success with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. He sneers at the sort of “cornpone” Americana his one-time collaborator is selling now that the country is at war.
He takes particular exception to the use of an exclamation mark in the title.
Lorenz speaks out on various other subjects throughout the night, like the dialogue in that great new film, “Casablanca,” and what he finds most erotic (the latter can’t be shared here).
Most provocatively, in an inversion of the Main Character Syndrome he seems at times to be afflicted with, he suggests that if the world’s a play, we’re all just extras in it. It’s a commentary that will sadly echo as the night grows older.
Mostly, though, he talks about Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old Yale fine arts student with theatrical aspirations of her own.
He sees the possibility of a new muse in her, and plans to finally win her over with flowers and a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage.” Alas, when they get the chance to talk in private, we find out the latter offering is all too appropriate.
That, and his abortive attempt at reviving his partnership with Rodgers when the latter arrives to celebrate his newest success, tell him the band has long passed him by.
Hawke’s take on this role comes one immediate strike against him. He doesn’t look anything like the real Lorenz Hart. His face was already halfway there when he played Chet Baker, but this time he has to undergo an all-too obvious makeup job that makes him look more like Henry Fonda than anyone else.
There’s also the fact that Hart topped out at five feet tall at the most, and Hawke is just an inch or two under six. That means we get several awkward moments where he’s posed with other actors in an attempt to create the illusion of a great height difference.
No matter, because Hawke is electrifying as a man still trying to locate the spark of life within him, and it’s near impossible to think of another actor who could do so well in the role. We spend the evening as transfixed on him as Wallace Shawn was on Andre Gregory during their dinner together, just enjoying listening to him talk both the evening and his regrets away.
He speaks in a rapid-fire patter, barely giving himself a moment to breathe, and yet we’re able to take in every word without difficulty. He’s alternately funny, frustrating (on purpose) and thoughtful, and we’re ultimately emotionally invested in him, despite his personal flaws.
Linklater is uniquely suited to this project, having previously made “Before Sunrise” and “Dazed and Confused,” films consisting largely of extended conversations over a single evening. Even going back as far as “Slacker” he evidenced a great delight in listening to eccentrics speak, bouncing one conversation off another, and allowing his characters to reveal themselves in the process.
Of course, Hawke and Linklater wouldn’t be able to work as well together without the benefit of a decent script, and Robert Kaplow (who previously wrote another of Linklater’s finest films, “Me and Orson Welles”) provides the right words for their music.
The dialogue embodies the sort of perceptive, twisting wit that was a hallmark of Hart’s own lyrics. Did Lorenz Hart really talk like this? I don’t think anyone ever did, but it’s the way he should have spoken if one just goes by the way he wrote.
Not all of the film works quite as well. A brief discussion with fellow restaurant patron E.B. White is initially amusing. Hart finally holds a conversation with someone who is his opposite in personality but still able to match him in witty perceptiveness. But when Hart helps come up with a name for the mouse in the children’s story White is writing, it’s far too cloying.
It seems even more contrived that he should also have similar meet-cutes with Stephen Sondheim and George Roy Hill (he’s simply referred to as “George Hill” and who will recognize him as the future director of “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?”) in the same evening.
Moments like these belong in fables like “Forrest Gump,” not in a drama of realistic possibilities.
Then there’s Qualley’s character, who takes our breath away the moment she enters the room. If she doesn’t match Hawke in the reading of lines, she at least is able to similarly command our attention as well.
The real Lorenz Hart may not have been attracted to women, but we can understand why he’d be enamored of this one specifically.
There’s nothing wrong with her performance, yet there’s something about how the character is presented that makes her sensibilities seem too modern for the period milieu. Qualley disappeared into her character and the Sixties setting in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” but from the moment we first see her in “Blue Moon,” she seems like a 21st-century-woman in 1940s fashions.
Then again, maybe that’s the whole point. The cliché is to have the younger woman represent a past chance, a missed opportunity for a better life that the hero never grasped. But Qualley instead speaks for a tomorrow that will never come for our protagonist.
For once, he’s forced to truly listen to someone else speak, limiting his interruptions. And near the end, when his former songwriting partner spirits her away from him, we realize that even had he lived longer, his career would likely not have survived the shifting waves of postwar public taste, at least not as well as Rodgers managed to.
“Blue Moon” marks the ninth collaboration between Hawke and Linklater over a 300-year span. It’s a far less prolific partnership than that between Rodgers and Hart, but they’ve still managed to produce a small handful of movies together that will likely at least enjoy cult status.
Lorenz Hart, in contrast, was just 48 when he died, but had packed enough work for three lifetimes, having written (at conservative estimations) at least 800 songs alone or in collaboration. It’s only a small percentage of those that endure, however brightly.
It’s difficult for those of us who have followed their careers to think of Hawke being 55, or even for Linklater being 65. They have matured as artists and display a wisdom not apparent in their younger years, but there’s still a youthful vitality to their work that refuses to fade.
Perhaps Hawke and Linklater could have made “Blue Moon” earlier, but it’s unlikely they could have done so with the same level of depth and understanding of what truly matters in art and life alike.
We should be glad they waited this long: “Blue Moon” is one of the best movies of 2025.
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