BLUE MOON

Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott
Certificate: 15
Rating: 8/10

At this point the musical biopic is an unstoppable juggernaut of a genre, a heedless commercial cybertruck speeding on regardless of artistic success or audience appetite. In 2025 we’ve had Bob and the Boss, in 2026 we’re promised some strange new version of the Michael Jackson and Bee Gees stories and beyond that there’s the endless gathering storm of Sam Mendes’ Beatles cinematic event. But I’d be willing to bet that none of them come close to the wit, insight and bittersweet glory of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, telling the story of the last days of the poet maudit of the Broadway musical, Lorenz Hart (lyricist of “My Funny Valentine” among many others).

On the face of it, it’s a modest affair, more a one-man stage show than a feature film. It’s 1943, New York, the opening night of Oklahoma! and Hart has slipped out of a show he finds irredeemably cornball to hold court to his favourite bar tender, as the triumphant reception is being prepared at Sardi’s. After two decades coining couplets for Richard Rodger’s levitating melodies, Hart’s neuroses and bad behaviour have finally seen him usurped as lyricist by the more reliable Oscar Hammerstein, and he can see the grim writing on the wall. 

But he’s nevertheless irrepressible, full of fierce, fresh ardour for an unlikely flame - a gawky blonde, 20 year old Yale co-ed played by Margaret Qualley. The film becomes an aria of his infatuation as he buttonholes every passing stranger, trying new ways to describe his passion, like a more flamboyant Kevin Rowland at the start of “This Is What She’s Like”.

Hart is manifested in the unlikely form of Ethan Hawke, filmically foreshortened to five foot, so he struggles to climb onto his barstool, crowned with a bathetic combover instead of a laurel wreath. It’s unlikely casting and a stagey conceit, but somehow, like the most endearingly implausible Lorenz Hart couplet, it pays off spectacularly. For all Hawke’s storied history with Richard Linklater this might be their finest collaboration yet - a profound, bittersweet rhapsody to the power of words and music