In Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, a devastated, melancholic, near has-been song writer, pondering about the successful past, while his creative partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), celebrates his latest play sensation. With a clever bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and a young beauty (Margaret Qualley) lending him their ears at the bar (the film's only setting, for the most part) to his soliloquies, the movie plays out more like a play with only a handful of characters than a cinematic experience.
Yet Hawke manages to charm and impress, as he nearly always does when matched with Linklater. As Hart, he emits an intellectual, glowing somberness that's masked under a thin layer of denial about his career's inevitable cessation. Named after Hart & Rodgers' famous 1934 hit song, Blue Moon is - more or less - a one man show that overachieves where other, more ambitious movies have failed. It's a celluloid version of the song itself, executed with delicate skill and perhaps Hawke's greatest performance yet.
☆☆☆
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