Ethan Hawke disappears into the role of Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater's intimate, melancholic Blue Moon, a film that blends historical fact and fiction around the opening night of Oklahoma! and is now streaming on Netflix
Blue Moon is a quiet, almost theatrical portrait of a man unraveling. Richard Linklater directs; Ethan Hawke gives a bracing, finely tuned performance that keeps the film tethered to a single, aching point of view.
Rather than following a standard biopic arc, the movie compresses its action into one evening at Sardi’s, that storied restaurant in New York’s theater district. What we get are conversations, recollections and jealousies that pile up like courses at a tasting menu—each one revealing a little more about Lorenz Hart, the lyricist behind standards such as “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” The film privileges mood and character over plot mechanics, choosing intimacy over sweeping chronology.
Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow built the film from letters, archival scraps and deliberate invention. Kaplow mined correspondence—most notably between Hart and Elizabeth Weiland—and then filled the spaces with imagined moments that feel true to character if not to the literal record. That choice turns Blue Moon into an interior study rather than a cradle-to-grave catalogue: it maps feeling onto fact and lets the offstage life of an artist read through small, lived gestures.
The pivot around which the film orbits is the premiere night of Oklahoma!, a turning point that is treated as public triumph for Richard Rodgers and a private wound for Hart. Linklater stages that contrast with restraint: the camera lingers on micro-expressions, the pauses before a line, the way a drink is lifted and set down. Hawke’s Hart is brittle, funny in a corrosive way, and often fatigued; he carries the movie’s emotional freight in rooms that feel half backstage and half confessional.
Supporting performances provide steady counters. Andrew Scott gives Rodgers a warm, professional reserve; Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth is practical and elusive; Bobby Cannavale anchors many of the film’s confessions as the bartender who listens and occasionally deflects. Together the ensemble creates a social ecology where rivalry and tenderness coexist, sometimes uneasily.
Design and sound do a lot of the heavy lifting. The production favors suggestive period detail over museum-level accuracy—muted palettes, worn objects, narrow corridors that feel like memories. The score and diegetic piano pieces—many by Hart and Rodgers—underscore inner conflict rather than supply crowd-pleasing moments. Cinematography favors tight frames and long takes, permitting performances to breathe and small beats to accumulate meaning.
The film wears its blend of fact and fiction openly. It depicts documented elements of Hart’s later life—alcoholism, decline, and his collapse in the rain in 1943, dying of pneumonia at 48—alongside invented encounters that illuminate temperament. Kaplow has acknowledged fabricating exchanges, including a playful, apocryphal meeting with E.B. White and a nod to Stuart Little; the youthful appearance of Stephen Sondheim functions more as mythic texture than strict history. Those inventions are framed as interpretive devices, deliberately sharpening emotional truth at the cost of chronological exactitude.
That strategy invites a viewerly responsibility: to separate verifiable record from dramatic reconstruction. Linklater doesn’t argue for one version of truth; he offers a sympathetic rendering of interior life, trusting the audience to weigh evidence against imagination. The result is less forensic biography than an elegy for an artist eclipsed—by changing tastes, by another man’s success, and by personal demons.
Stylistically the film favors restraint. Hands, worn objects and tired faces take on narrative weight; silences and abrupt musical cues register cultural dissonance between Hart’s urbane wit and Rodgers’ drift toward populist sentiment. Occasional cinematic devices—forced perspective and practical camera tricks—hint at Hart’s stature in the room but never upend the film’s emotional throughline. Every choice, from set dressing to the rhythmic pacing of scenes, feels calibrated to reveal character rather than to dazzle.
Blue Moon will appeal to viewers who prefer performance-driven, introspective dramas. It resists hagiography while acknowledging the lasting power of Hart’s lyrics; it dwells on rivalry, solitude and the cost of creativity without flattening motive. The film’s tone is elegiac rather than explanatory, and that’s its strength: Linklater composes an atmosphere in which regret and resilience can coexist, where small gestures tell a truer story than a parade of dates.
Rather than following a standard biopic arc, the movie compresses its action into one evening at Sardi’s, that storied restaurant in New York’s theater district. What we get are conversations, recollections and jealousies that pile up like courses at a tasting menu—each one revealing a little more about Lorenz Hart, the lyricist behind standards such as “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” The film privileges mood and character over plot mechanics, choosing intimacy over sweeping chronology.0