'Blue Moon' has something to talk about
Sony Pictures Classics
You don’t have to care about classic musicals to go for “Blue Moon,” but you do have to be a good listener. Directed by Richard Linklater (“Before Sunrise,” “Tape”), this is another all-talk, little-action effort, and your mileage will vary based on how annoying you find the banter or how much profound, snarky sadness you absorb among the never-ending verbal exchanges.
“Exchanges” might be overstating it a little; Lorenz Hart (frequent Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke) dominates many of the conversations he’s in, even if it’s just with the energy with which he fawns over Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) or simultaneously seethes and drools toward his longtime professional partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott, excellent in only a bit of screen time), who now has a big hit on his hands thanks to lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) and “Oklahoma!” So much of “Blue Moon” sits on the line between sweet and tart, talky and lovely and anguished about the feeling that once-abundant opportunities now belong to someone else. It’s a study of artistic connection and disconnection, swoony and old-fashioned but also plenty modern in its loneliness.
The movie opens with quotes labeling Hart as both “alert and dynamic and fun to be around” and “the saddest man I knew.” In Hawke’s performance, delivering the actor’s trademark speed-talking rhythms in a new key, analytical and clever but now defensive, the songwriter comes off as talented and troubled, highly regarded professionally and a rough hang personally. That Hawke and Linklater mostly pull off the illusion of making the nearly six-foot actor seem like the five-foot Hart is less impressive than the film’s ability to continually win you back even if you might sometimes grow tired of all the chatter about great art and weak writing and a self-described alcoholic trying to be cute as he requests please can I have just one more shot.
Qualley makes for more inspired casting than Bobby Cannavale (as a bartender with whom Hart quotes “Casablanca”), even if at 31 she’s too old to play 20. And as a fountain of cultural commentary (there are some great, wicked lines best not spoiled) as well as a look at a creative person who sees how the work can be beloved without the person who made it attached, “Blue Moon” inspires plenty of thought about what gets made, by whom, and who had to be discarded before that art could make it into the world.
B
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