‘Blue moon, you saw me standing alone’ runs the line from songwriting double-act Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s classic ballad. But as Boyhood director Richard Linklater’s bittersweet film about the estranged pair proves, you don’t have to be on your own to be alone.
Linklater’s long-term collaborator Ethan Hawke transforms into the rumpled, melancholy Hart. He slouches in the washed-up man’s shrunken frame and balding crown. Down on his luck and drinking heavily, his once-grand writing partnership with Rodgers (a sharply tuxedoed Andrew Scott) has been dashed, thanks to his increasing unreliability. It hurts on a bone-deep level.
Slipping out of Oklahoma!’s opening night in March 1943, the semi-closeted Hart slinks round the corner to the afterparty at Broadway haunt Sardi’s to bitch about the musical. Blue Jasmine’s Bobby Cannavale plays a charismatic barman who listens to the older man’s grousing, while valiantly trying not to pour him whiskies. As they shoot the breeze while a young serviceman (Jonah Lees) playing piano, the subject of Casablanca crops up. You can expect Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman-like banter from Robert Kaplow’s finely-tuned screenplay, an expert evocation of the ‘40s.
Linklater knows how to draw the most intimate performances from Ethan Hawke
The sense of theatricality fits the subject matter perfectly. Cinematographer Shane F Kelly’s camera slinks nimbly through Sardi’s confined spaces as Hart holds court. He’s mooning after The Substance star Margaret Qualley’s brassy dame Elizabeth Weiland, a Yale student he’s been writing to. An attempted seduction in the cloakroom signals loneliness more than lust.
But it’s halfway up the stairs to the unseen restaurant where Rodgers and his new wingman Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) will be feted that Blue Moon’s most gut-wrenching moment plays out. Linklater knows how to draw the most intimate performances from Hawke – and he’s brilliant here. His pairing with Scott, so devastating in All of Us Strangers, is note-perfect. As they stand frozen for a moment, the director captures so much on flickering faces: love and despair, anger and hope.
One is on his way up to the party, literally and metaphorically; the other going down, destined to be forgotten by history. It’s the perfect distillation of Blue Moon’s wounded heart.
Blue Moon premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.