Blue Moon in Berlin

Premiering in the Berlinale’s main competition, Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, the five-foot-tall lyricist renowned for his work with composer Richard Rodgers. They wrote nearly thirty musicals together, landed on the cover of Time in 1938, and among their more than five hundred songs are such immortal standards as “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and of course, “Blue Moon.”

In a brief prologue, Hart, drunk and stumbling, collapses on a cold and rainy night in an anonymous alleyway. A radio announcer establishes the date of his death at the age of forty-eight: November 22, 1943. Flash back a few months to March 31, the night of the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma!, the first musical by Rodgers and his new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Hart slips out of the St. James Theatre before the final number and heads over to Sardi’s, and within moments, it becomes clear why Larry is a beloved regular. The man can talk. Before Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and his entourage arrive to toast each other and cheer as each rave review of Oklahoma! is phoned in, Larry grabs and holds the ears of Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), the sympathetic bartender, and the young piano player Larry nicknames on the spot: Knuckles (Jonah Lees).

Larry’s soliloquies rise and fall with rousing crescendos and intense pauses, rapturous reveries to the mutual and “irrational” adoration he shares with Elizabeth, a twenty-year-old Yale student played by Margaret Qualley, and stinging takedowns of Oklahoma! and its exclamation mark. At Slant, Marshall Shaffer notes that screenwriter Robert Kaplow, whose novel Me and Orson Welles was adapted by Linklater in 2008, “pays the truest tribute to his subject by giving the film over to his long-winded musings for extended durations.” And Hawke is “theatrical in the best way possible, commanding the screen with his every gesture and utterance without overplaying any of them,” writes David Opie at IndieWire.

Larry is driven by “an infectious energy,” writes Nicholas Bell at Ioncinema, but he’s been “long desensitized to social cues, making him something of a black hole. Kaplow’s script expertly dances between these complexities of character, building to painful peaks of emotion as the dialogue ripples outward with repeated sentiments, when initially innocuous passages return with a haunting glory.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney salutes the “superbly cast actors,” the headliners and the supporting players, including Patrick Kennedy as a bemused E. B. White, John Doran as the snappy photographer Weegee, and Cillian Sullivan as the precocious thirteen-year-old Stephen Sondheim. “While Linklater never tries to gloss over the static nature of the setting or the theatricality of material that could easily be a play,” writes Rooney, “he’s a director who has few equals when it comes to keeping a talk-based movie buoyant, a skill that the Before trilogy honed to perfection.”