Blue Moon: Ethan Hawke moves as a pathetic artist (review)
In this film released directly to VOD, Richard Linklater recounts the decline of lyricist Lorenz Hart, and offers a powerful role to his favorite actor.
Richard Linklater completed three shoots during the year 2024. In order: New wavestory of the making of Out of breath by Jean-Luc Godard, released in theaters last fall; then part of the musical Merrily We Roll Alongnew conceptual project at the Boyhood that the filmmaker intends to film over a period of twenty years, the release of which is planned around 2040 (!); and finally Blue Moonshown at the Berlinale in early 2025, nominated for the next Oscar ceremony (in the categories of best actor, for Ethan Hawke, and best original screenplay) and which has just arrived here directly on VOD.
Blue Moon forms a sort of diptych with New wavearound the question of the collective nature of artistic creation. A diptych in the style of an inverted reflection: the film about Godard recounted the birth of an artist, whose genius managed to flourish thanks to the youthful enthusiasm of his band of comrades-in-arms, all united behind the same flag. Blue Moon depicts quite the opposite, by painting the portrait of another exceptional artist, Lorenz Hart, but at the end of his life (he is only 48 years old), when he is dumped by his best friend and lifelong artistic partner. Either a group and youth film versus a film of decline and solitude.
Much less identified in France than Godard, Hart is a sacred monster of American music, the lyricist of some immense standards of the first half of the 20th century, such as My Funny Valentine, The Lady Is A Tramp and, you will have understood, Blue Moon. The film captures him one evening in 1943, a few months before his death, in a chic Broadway bar next to the theater where the musical premiered. Oklahoma!which his former colleague Richard Rodgers wrote with a new associate, Oscar Hammerstein II. Oklahoma! will soon become one of the biggest classics of the American repertoire, the Rodgers & Hammerstein duo will enter into legend, and Hart therefore finds himself, that evening and for the few months that remain to him, lonely, violently “ghosted” by his former best friend.
Written by Robert Kaplow, who had already inspired Linklater to write another artist portrait (Orson Welles & Me), Blue Moon adopts a very theatrical form: Hart (Ethan Hawke), a notorious alcoholic, sits at the bar, talking and calling out to the other characters: a friendly bartender played by Bobby Cannavale, the writer EB White (the author of Stuart Little) who has a drink a few meters from him, a GI who plays some of his hits on the piano… The bar will gradually fill up, and we will soon see the arrival of former friend Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and young student Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), with whom Hart tries to convince himself that he is going to live a great love story.
The device is minimalist, a little “stiff” at first, but ends up seducing when you get caught up in Hart’s flow, his smooth-talking logorrhea, by turns flamboyant and pathetic. It’s a film about a lyricist and it’s therefore a film about speech, about words, where we comment on the lyrics popular songs, where we compare the lines of Casablanca (the film has just been released and is on everyone’s minds), where we discuss a maxim by Somerset Maughan (“In a couple, there is the one who loves and the one who accepts to be loved.), which we end up understanding also applies to stories of non-reciprocal friendship, like the one that is slowly killing Hart.
Hart’s flow is that of Ethan Hawke, frankly phenomenal in a role which, on paper, resembled a priori to a performance at Oscar-d’as-tu-vu, based on impossible physical transformation. The actor shaved his head to reproduce Hart’s baldness and especially “shrinked” himself for the role – Hart was known for his small size and Linklater’s direction invents a whole bunch of ploys (sometimes unintentionally comical, it must be said) to give the impression that Ethan Hawke is two heads shorter than Margaret Qualley or Andrew Scott.
If the actor of the trilogy Before…Linklater’s old traveling companion, has therefore departed for the time of a film from his coolness as an eternal grunge hunk, he is nonetheless here at the heart of his romantic concerns, with this portrait of a non-conformist, self-destructive creator, incapable of playing the game of mainstream and entertainment feel-good to the Oklahoma!and who consequently sees his creative forces abandon him little by little. Lorenz Hart is a precursor of all the rebellious American artists who we imagine made Ethan Hawke fantasize about in his youth. Banned from the world of entertainment, marginalized, the lyricist will still speak until the end of the night, until he realizes that he has perhaps already said everything about his solitude in the text of Blue Moonto the point of being bloodless, speechless – “out of breath”as the other would say.
Blue Moonby Richard Linklater, with Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott… On VOD.
