Blue Moon
Richard Linklater's Blue Moon is a 100-minute hangout movie set in one restaurant on one night, and it works because Ethan Hawke refuses to let you look away.
Full analysis belowBlue Moon is not a bait-and-switch. The marketing makes clear this is a biographical drama about Lorenz Hart, a gay Jewish songwriter who drank himself to death. You know what you're walking into.
Richard Linklater's Blue Moon is a 100-minute hangout movie set in one restaurant on one night, and it works because Ethan Hawke refuses to let you look away.
The setup is simple. It's March 31, 1943. Lorenz Hart, once half of the most celebrated songwriting duo in Broadway history, has slipped out of the opening night of Oklahoma!, the blockbuster musical his ex-partner Richard Rodgers wrote with a new collaborator. Hart ends up at Sardi's, where the post-show celebration is being set up. Over the course of the evening, he drinks, holds court, flirts, lies, confesses, and watches everything he built walk out the door.
Hart's sexuality sits at the center of this movie and there's no dancing around it. He calls himself "omnisexual," flirts with a flower delivery boy, and carries a torch for Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old Yale art student with whom he's had months of correspondence and one unconsummated weekend. The film treats Hart's closeted existence with empathy and without any winking modern editorializing. This is how it was. He loved who he loved, and 1943 America had no room for it. Conservative viewers who can't tolerate that subject matter should skip this one entirely. No judgment. But there it is.
Here's where things get interesting for our audience: the movie doesn't let Hart off the hook. Not even close. Hart is a drunk. A narcissist. A man who blew up his own partnership because he couldn't show up sober and on time. The film makes this crystal clear. When Rodgers (Andrew Scott, superb in a Silver Bear-winning performance) pulls Hart aside to suggest a collaboration on a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, you can see the wariness in Scott's eyes. He's offering an olive branch to a man who's set fire to every olive branch he's ever been given.
The movie doesn't blame society for all of that. Yes, being closeted in 1943 was a form of slow torture. The film acknowledges that honestly. But Hart's alcoholism, his self-pity, his inability to match Rodgers' discipline... the film lays those at his feet. He had talent that Hammerstein could only dream of, and he poured it down the drain. Seven months after this evening, he collapsed drunk in the street and died a few days later. The film ends with that fact, unadorned. No redemption arc. No last-minute sobriety. Vice has consequences. Full stop.
There's something genuinely conservative buried in Hart's lament about Oklahoma! He sees it as the death of sophistication in musical theater, the triumph of earnest Americana over wit. Whether Linklater agrees or not is beside the point. The film gives Hart's position real weight. You feel the loss of a particular tradition, a particular style, being steamrolled by the culture.
Bobby Cannavale plays Eddie, the bartender at Sardi's, and he's the film's quiet conscience. He tries not to serve Hart liquor. He listens. He and Hart bond over a shared love of Casablanca. It's a small, warm performance that grounds the film when Hawke's pyrotechnics threaten to overwhelm it.
The historical cameos are a delight. Patrick Kennedy shows up as E. B. White, and there's a lovely scene where Hart invents the name "Stuart" for a mouse that keeps visiting his apartment. White jots something in his notebook. If you know your children's literature, you smile. Young Stephen Sondheim appears as Hammerstein's protege. George Roy Hill (future director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) gets Hart's autograph. Weegee lurks around with his camera. The film creates a tapestry of mid-century American culture that treats its legacy with genuine reverence.
Is this a woke movie? It depends on how strict your definition is. The progressive elements are real: Hart's queerness is presented sympathetically, his closeted suffering is framed as unjust, and the film's emotional architecture demands you feel for a gay man who couldn't live openly. But the traditional elements are just as real: personal responsibility for one's choices, consequences of vice and addiction, reverence for artistic craft and cultural heritage, and a character study that holds its subject accountable rather than canonizing him. These two currents run side by side and the film never resolves the tension between them. That's actually what makes it good.
You will not feel lectured. That alone sets Blue Moon apart from most prestige cinema in 2025.
| Trope | Category | Location | Authenticity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normalization of Non-Traditional Sexuality | WOKE | Throughout -- Hart's homosexuality and bisexuality form the emotional core | Organic |
| The Sympathetic Outsider | WOKE | Throughout -- Hart framed as brilliant outsider on every axis | Organic |
| Institutional Evil (Implied) | WOKE | Background throughout -- mid-century America's treatment of gay men | Organic |
| Consequences of Vice | TRADITIONAL | Throughout and closing text -- Hart's alcoholism destroys everything | Organic |
| Personal Accountability | TRADITIONAL | Throughout -- Hart held responsible for sabotaging his own talent | Organic |
| Industry and Perseverance / Artistic Discipline | TRADITIONAL | Hart's lament about Oklahoma!; the Hart-Rodgers dynamic | Organic |
| Wise Elder / Respect for Legacy | TRADITIONAL | Throughout -- historical cameos and reverence for Broadway's golden age | Organic |
Director: Richard Linklater
NEUTRALTwenty-two films spanning anarchic indie, mainstream comedy, anti-corporate expose, small-town Texas sympathy, and philosophical romance. One explicitly progressive outlier (Fast Food Nation) in a sea of humanist, character-driven work. Linklater is not a filmmaker with an ideological mission. He follows stories that interest him.
Writer: Robert Kaplow
Literary novelist. No political body of work. His published novels include Alessandra in Between (1994) and Me and Orson Welles (2003), which Linklater adapted into a film in 2008. The screenplay is inspired by the real letters of Elizabeth Weiland to Lorenz Hart.
Producers
- Mike Blizzard (Wild Atlantic Pictures) — Irish producer. His involvement reflects the film's Irish production base (shot in Dublin's Troy Studios). No significant ideological signal.
- John Sloss (Cinetic Media) — Major independent film producer, sales agent, and entertainment lawyer. Slate tends toward prestige indie cinema. Business-driven figure who backs commercially viable independent projects.
- Richard Linklater — See director profile. As producer on his own film, his editorial control is significant but his ideological signal is neutral.
Full Cast
Fidelity Casting Analysis ENHANCED
Hawke is tall and handsome playing a short, physically unattractive man. Faithful in every other respect.
The real Lorenz Hart was approximately 5'0" tall, physically slight, and described by contemporaries as unattractive. Ethan Hawke is 5'10", conventionally handsome, and possesses rugged charisma that Hart never had. Hart's physical unattractiveness was central to his self-image and his difficulty in romantic relationships. However, Hawke compensates through performance, playing Hart as physically diminished, hunched, desperate. This is standard Hollywood biographical casting (attractive actors playing less attractive subjects) and doesn't carry ideological weight. The rest of the cast is appropriately matched. The cast is overwhelmingly white, which accurately reflects the demographics of a 1943 Broadway restaurant.
Adult Viewer Insight
Adult conservative viewers have a real decision to make with Blue Moon, and it's worth being honest about the terms. If frank depictions of homosexuality are a hard line for you, skip this one. The film's protagonist is a gay man, his sexuality is central to the story, and the movie asks you to feel his pain. It does not apologize for this. For those who can engage, there's something genuinely worthwhile here. Linklater is not lecturing you. He's showing you a man who had extraordinary gifts and wasted them. The moral framework of the film is deeply traditional even when the subject matter is not. Pay attention to the Hart-Rodgers dynamic. Rodgers is everything Hart is not: disciplined, reliable, productive. He shows up. He does the work. He builds something that lasts. Hart, for all his superior talent, can't manage any of that. The contrast is a quiet argument for the traditional virtues of discipline and perseverance over raw genius. Talent without character is just potential, and potential has an expiration date.
Parental Guidance
No violence. Mild sexual content (flirtation, discussion of sexuality, no nudity or sex scenes). Moderate adult language. Heavy thematic presence of alcoholism as the film's central destructive force. Hart drinks throughout and the film ends with his death from alcoholism. Emotional intensity from Hart's desperation and rejection scenes. Minimum age 14, recommended 16+. The content is entirely adult in theme (sexuality, alcoholism, depression, artistic failure, death) but not in graphic depiction. Younger teens won't connect with the Broadway history or the dialogue-heavy format.
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