Scan the wall of Sardi’s, the restaurant and bar in midtown Manhattan that’s served as the watering hole for Broadway’s biggest names over the decades, and you’ll find caricatures of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II sitting side by side. The men are considered the most successful songwriting duo in the history of American theater, and were responsible for Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music — just a handful of highly successful, totally game-changing musicals. They get prime real estate in this particular Hall of Fame above the booths.
Over in the eatery’s corner, a little higher up, is a sketch of Lorenz Hart. He’s got a huge cigar in his mouth, a furrowed brow, and a sardonic smile, as if the artist caught him seconds after a notably witty quip. You could not ask for a more concise drawing of old-timey showbiz, an instant flashback back to an era of tin-pan alleys and 23 skidoos. Hart was Rodgers’ first partner, a lyricist par excellence who provided the words for standards like “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “With a Song in My Heart,” and “Blue Moon.” If the Great American Songbook were an actual book, he would be listed on the cover as a co-author. And yet, after his serious drinking problem deep-sixed his professional relationship with the composer — who then went on to form a far more famous and fruitful collaboration with Hammerstein — Hart was relegated to something like a footnote in his friend’s story. He died drunk in the streets at the age of 48.
Richard Linklater‘s Blue Moon doesn’t necessarily come to praise Hart. But it does want to give him a proper burial, zeroing in on one of the worst moments of his life and offering a glimpse of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this genius. Like Gary Marmorstein’s 2012 biography, A Ship Without a Sail, it begins at the end, with the songwriter stumbling soused into the night and laying himself to rest on a dingy curb. He’s already a dead man walking. Then the movie rewinds back seven months to March 31, 1943, an evening that will live in infamy for Hart. It’s the opening night of Oklahoma! on Broadway. Hart sat in the balcony of the St. James Theatre and watched his old partner score his greatest triumph. Listen beneath the rousing a-yip-i-o-ee-ays onstage, and you could hear the sound of a heart breaking.
Hart, it’s worth noting, was five feet tall, balding, arthritic, and somewhat stout — not the kind of role that immediately makes you scream, “Oh, you know who would be perfect to play him? Ethan Hawke!” The rangy star has previously immersed himself in performances that require both physical transformation and pitching outside of his comfort zone (see his extraordinary work as abolitionist John Brown in the limited series The Good Lord Bird). This part requires him to appear a foot shorter than usual via practical effects and rock a badly dyed combover. When he first appears onscreen, throwing shade at the play’s extravagant climax, the look immediately runs the risk of both eclipsing the acting and reducing the musical legend to someone indulging in George Costanza cosplay.
Yet Hawke turns out to be a surprisingly perfect fit for the role, because it taps into a specialty of both his and his longtime collaborator-director’s: the gift of gab. The Before Sunrise star has always been one of modern movies’ great talkers, and Linklater has never met a chin-stroking chat-fest he didn’t want to extend to feature-length; given how Robert Kaplow’s screenplay revolves around Hart complaining, castigating folks, and holding court in Sardi’s for close to 90 minutes, you can see why they were attracted to this project. Once Hart rolls into the bar while curtain calls are happening down the block, the badmouthing begins in earnest and everything becomes marinated in bourbon and bitterness. What, you thought you were in for a lush Hollywood throwback about a Broadway legend? This biopic in miniature comes with a chaser of arsenic.
Because though the creators and investors of Oklahoma!, including Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), are there to celebrate the play’s afterparty, Hart has shown up in order to throw himself a first-rate pity party. For starters, “Larry” has ordered Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), the resident bartender of Sardi’s, to not serve him any drinks. Then he’ll ask him to pour a tiny shot of Old Forrester — “the whiskey that made Lorenz Hart unemployable” — so he can stare at it, or vicariously watch a young deliveryman down it. Actually, Eddie, pour me another, I simply want to smell it, he says. You know what? Just leave the bottle.
Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley in Blue Moon
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Soon, Hart finds other patrons and verbal sparring partners, always making sure to play to his audience. He keeps yelling out his tunes for the pianist (Jonah Lees) to play. When Hart spots E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) in a corner booth, he gushes over the writer’s essays and reads an old newspaper clipping about how great he and Rodgers were; the tunesmith will also inadvertently inspire the basis for Stuart Little. When Rodgers shows up, he alternately flatters and berates his old pal — Scott, it should be said, turns his role into an overture of impatience, contempt, secondhand embarrassment, and barely concealed irritation, providing a great partner for Hawke’s passive-aggressive half of their pas de deux. A pitch for a Marco Polo spectacle with singing cannibals falls on deaf ears. Hart will insult Hammerstein as a third-rate talent and then, upon being face-to-face with his rival, spews over-the-top compliments. The aura of loserdom hovers over him. Not even Hammerstein’s young companion, a precocious musical-theater fan from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, named Stephen [cough, cough], is impressed.
And then there’s Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), the young Yale student with whom Hart is infatuated. Though Hart preferred the company of his own sex when it came to carnal affairs, he claims to be head over heels for his so-called protégé. Weiland has affection for him yet keeps him strictly in the friend zone. Still, Hart insists she tell him everything about her recent after-hours escapades with campus hunks, because his version of self-care is self-torture. He’s not in love with her so much as in love with the idea of being in love — a concept he’s written dozens of songs about, yet can’t seem to experience himself.
Hawke sells all of Hart’s delusions, destructive impulses, and high-velocity downward spirals with an energy that keeps this bitchy, old-school collection of bon mots and screwball bickering moving along nicely. Portraits of great men given the movie-star treatment usually accentuate the positive. Linklater finds it more interesting to look at a self-sabotaging artist’s greatest misses. It’s a tribute that’s really a cautionary tale. The fact that the film is named after its subject’s most beloved — and most despised by Hart himself — hit tells you everything. The laughter among the assembled suggest it’s a comedy. By the time the camera captures the distance between those Sardi’s portraits at the end, you’re reminded that Hart’s breezy tunes have been soundtracking one long, in-progress tragedy.
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