Film Review: BLUE MOON, In Cinemas

Before there was Rodgers and Hammerstein, there was Rodgers and Hart. Quite a lot of Rodgers and Hart truth be told - 28 musicals and over 500 songs. So when the split came (Richard Rodgers had grown tired of Lorenz Hart’s unreliability caused by booze and plenty more issues) and he hooked up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create monument after monument of Musical Theatre, the wisecracking, fragile genius of a lyricist was never going to take it well.

Set on the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, or, as Hart would have it, and not without some justification, Oklahoma Exclamation Point just a few months before his death, Hart is still a sparkling wit and raconteur, but the bitterness of the split, his neediness for Rodgers’ companionship and music and his reluctant, ineffective abstemiousness, is already overwhelming his wafer-thin sense of self. Few sights are more terrifying for an artist than decades of hearing, “Didn’t you once work with…” stretching out in front of you. Hart is too smart not to realise that such is his fate.

Richard Linklater’s film, from Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, is very stagey indeed - all the action takes place in Sardi's, the favoured wartime hangout for Broadway types - and, just as it would in a theatre, the film demands a big performance from a star. Ethan Hawke, far too handsome for the part despite the hideous hair, is tremendous, bringing all his charisma and charm to the role, but lacing it with a vulnerability and just enough melancholy for us to feel the pain of a closeted man in a cruelly denying world.

He’s at his best, and there are close parallels with Sean Hayes’ sensational turn as Oscar Levant in Good Night, Oscar here, rattling out great lines, critiquing his own conversation for inelegance of phrasing - would that the rest of us could be so funny - and commanding the attention of anyone within earshot. Here is an incorrigible show-off with a cruel tongue, but we can’t help but watch.

As was the case in real life, everyone else is merely a support act in Hart’s main character energy psychodrama. Andrew Scott is, nevertheless, excellent as Rodgers, feeling a debt of gratitude to the older man, but now, literally and metaphorically, looking over Hart’s shoulder at a world within which his former writing partner could never survive. The respect, even the love, is still there, and he knows that the professional divorce will leave Hart alone and very, very vulnerable, but he can already see Carousel on the horizon with South Pacific and The Sound of Music not far off. And Lorenz Hart ain’t writing those!

Margaret Qualley fares less well as his would-be paramour, 20 year-old Elizabeth Weiland, on whose correspondence with Hart the film is based. She’s largely a foil for Hart’s projections of fantasies of seduction, explored in a too-long scene set in, don’t laugh now, Sardi’s closet. She also gets to demolish his soul with the line he’s heard all his life, “I love you… but not in that way”. 

The film is underscored by the extraordinary songbook Hart co-created, so we leave the cinema with, lurking in our ears, such classics as  "Blue Moon"; "The Lady Is a Tramp"; "Manhattan"; "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"; and "My Funny Valentine". It’s a reminder of how good he was and how much we missed when he drank himself into the gutter (literally) at 48 years of age.

Blue Moon is now in cinemas on general release

Image Credit: Sony Pictures