Film
Exceptional performances and spirited direction allow Richard Linklater’s new film, Blue Moon, to transcend a dismal screenplay. By Christos Tsiolkas.
Ethan Hawke strikes the right chord in Blue Moon
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon shouldn’t work. It is deliberately stagy, largely set in one location – the famous Broadway bar Sardi’s. It’s the 1943 premiere of Oklahoma!, the venerable and bloated musical that initiated the theatrical collaboration between lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rogers.
Rogers’ former collaborator, songwriter Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), has slipped out of the performance. He is trying, not very successfully, to avoid getting drunk while bitchily criticising the show to bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), and piano player Morty (Jonah Lees), a soldier on leave. In between excoriating the musical, the 47-year-old Hart is also extolling the love he feels for a young woman, 19-year-old Elizabeth Weiland, whom he believes will be the muse who will save him from both alcoholism and the dreaded fate of becoming a has-been. Yet Hawke’s longing, lustful stare at the hard buttocks of a departing flower delivery boy suggests that he has more subterranean, less rarefied obsessions.
The reason this film shouldn’t work is that Robert Kaplow’s screenplay is maudlin and shallow. Based on a series of letters exchanged between Hart and Weiland, the story’s revelations feel adolescent. The dramaturgical structure suggests Kaplow is a first-time playwright stolidly plotting his three acts.
Kaplow romanticises Hart similarly to the way he idealised Orson Welles in his novel Me and Orson Welles (which was adapted into a film by Linklater in 2008). His conception of Hart is one-note: that of the misunderstood artist. He captures some of Hart’s legendary wit, but alcoholism here is reduced to a matter of turning up late with a hangover, as if the addiction is akin to a teenager’s bender. The writing doesn’t hint at any of the Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of self-pity and cruelty that is endemic to alcoholism.
The screenplay’s nadir is a long conversation in the final act between Hart and Weiland, who is played by Margaret Qualley, an actor capable of grit and nuance. There are hints of Weiland being on the make, using Hart for an entree into Broadway. These intimations of hardness are quashed by the script’s insistence there is something solid, something beautiful, in the platonic friendship between this old drunk and the ingenue. The acuteness of Hart’s sexual repression and the desperation that props up his juvenile infatuation are elided in the script. This scene is interminable, with Hawke and Qualley valiantly trying to convey some element of honesty in the hackneyed exchange.
For all this, Blue Moon has a kick – that’s largely due to the performances of Hawke and Andrew Scott, who plays Rogers.
As a younger actor, Hawke always seemed to be trying hard to be likeable. He had charm and he was a generous supporting actor, always giving his fellow performers space. Even in his collaborations with Linklater – the Before trilogy and 2014’s elegiac Boyhood – it is his co-stars who remain most vivid in my memory. More recently, he has become an actor of great power and control. I thought him magnificent and compelling in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), an essaying of anguished loss of faith equal to the performances of Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand in Ingmar Bergman’s films.
He’s equally wonderful in Blue Moon, for which he has just received an Academy Award Best Actor nomination. Hawke is working against the sophomore ideas and clunky mechanics of the script, investing his performance of Hart with a slyness and desperation that make us believe the combination of resentment and terror that he is experiencing at his former collaborator’s success. He conveys the nervous tics and mental games of an addict but does so subtly. Watching him, we understand that alcoholism isn’t some adolescent spree: we comprehend the overwhelming weariness of the condition.
The film gains greater urgency with the appearance of Rogers and his entourage after the phenomenal success of Oklahoma!’s opening night. The interplay between Hawke and Scott is the most dynamic and complex relationship in the film, and once again the playing of these two performers overcomes the limitations of the script.
Scott captures both Rogers’ love for Hart and his wariness of him. We sense all their shared, agonising history, not in the writing but in the acting. I think the script for Blue Moon treats Rogers cavalierly, as a lecherous and greedy sellout. Scott achieves a lovely generosity in granting him some humanity.
Credit too must go to Linklater, whose direction is effervescently spirited in this film. There’s a large sentimental streak in Linklater, but in Blue Moon he has made a careful study of the astonishing suite of theatrical films Robert Altman made in the 1980s, when that great director was ostracised by Hollywood. As Altman did in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Streamers and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Linklater uses the limitations of the theatrical settings and form to playfully pay homage to mid 20th century Broadway.
This newfound playfulness is evident in the other film Linklater directed in 2025, Nouvelle Vague. In that film, which follows the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless, Linklater has fun using new wave techniques in a tribute to one of the most inventive periods of filmmaking. As with Blue Moon, probably the weakest element of Nouvelle Vague is the sentimentality of the script. If Kaplow idealises Hart, Linklater does the same with Godard.
Linklater’s freedom to play, to stretch his palette as a filmmaker, is exciting. I don’t want to suggest this new light-heartedness in his work is slight. It’s the mark of a mature artist who has the confidence to take risks, to be adventurous in his choices. Blue Moon plays out on a single set, but the mise en scène – aside from the ill-advised set piece between Weiland and Hart – never feels laboured.
If Scott gives Rogers some grace, Cannavale does the same for his small part as Eddie. He takes the most banal of theatrical clichés – that of the bartender who is a listening post for the main character – and invests the part with verve. Unfortunately, as with Qualley’s Weiland, there’s nothing that Patrick Kennedy can do in his role as the writer E. B. White to redeem the lazy delineation of his character. I usually love watching Kennedy, an actor who I think has never received his due, but the inclusion of his character is so facile that I felt embarrassed for him. A good dramaturge would have urged the cutting of that character on a first reading.
Finally, however, it is Hawke’s film. He portrays the suffering of a man who died only a few months after the events portrayed in the film. The demons of drink, sexual guilt and self-hatred are conveyed through his eyes, in how he uses his body. Hart has shrunk, as a man and as an artist. We see the flashes of the artist he once was in moments of savagery or envy, when his intoxicating mastery of language is allowed to fly. Hart’s love of words, his sophisticated lyricism, made him one of the great 20th century writers of popular song. Hawke conveys the wasted talent and shows us those flashes of brilliance. It’s a great performance and it honours the complications of failure.
This is a film that shouldn’t work, but after watching Hawke play Hart so intimately, so courageously for 90 minutes, I went home, put on Elvis Presley’s sublime version of Rogers and Hart’s “Blue Moon” from the legendary 1954 Sun Studio sessions, and cried my heart out.
Blue Moon opens in cinemas nationally on January 29.
ARTS DIARY
CULTURE Reception This Way
Museum of the Goldfields, Kalgoorlie/Karlkurla, until February 15
MUSICAL Little Shop of Horrors
Cremorne Theatre, Meanjin/Brisbane, February 3-16
EXHIBITION Yasmin Smith: Elemental Life
Museum of Contemporary Art, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until June 8
VISUAL ART subcultures
Belconnen Arts Centre, Ngambri/Canberra, until February 1
FESTIVAL Festivale
Venues throughout Launceston January 30–February 1
Last Chance
EXHIBITION Always Modern: The Heide Story
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, until January 25
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 21, 2026 as "Dark side of the moon".
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