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<\/a><\/p>\nThere was Dewey Finn, Ned Schneebly, Willoughby, Mason Evans Sr.\u2013\u2013now there\u2019s Lorenz (or Larry) Hart. Richard Linklater likes a certain type of guy, and maybe these features come across too infrequently in his female characters: charismatic, voluble, verbose, enthusiastic as a puppy, and if prone to morose stretches, never in a way that destabilizes an essential upbeat humanism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Blue Moon, which world-premiered at the Berlinale, is another beautifully personal work from Linklater, full of authorial idiosyncrasies and tics, but distinguishing the film from his corpus is it being the kind you can only make at a mature career stage. It\u2019s not so much that Linklater has nothing to prove\u2013\u2013screenplays like Robert Kaplow\u2019s and its rarified, remote milieu of mid-WWII New York theaterland can typically send financiers balking. With a \u201clegacy\u201d career, little favors and gives come your way; for Linklater, maybe his next will be a legitimate awards contender, and new relationships with acting talent can be brought to bear. And different or lower expectations for the end product allow him to really express who he is as an artist at this point in his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet on the timely subject of awards-campaigning, as Ethan Hawke gets older and even more respectable, some areas of the industry could well call him due. Blue Moon thankfully evades being an \u201cOscar movie,\u201d but portraying Lorenz Hart is an Oscar role. It just hits so many of the beats (or syllable stresses, given his provenance as a librettist): reams of dialogue to chew on, vast emotional range deftly calibrated, a slight physical transformation. Perhaps we feel overly conscious of this to the extent that it becomes dissonantly noticeable, with Hawke\u2019s pleading mannerisms to his scene partners (and awards body members beyond the screen), yet it\u2019s that fundamental Linklaterian garrulousness and charm that defeats this impulse.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re in the familiar yet still potent domain of bruised artistic egos, backstage drama, and subtle yet vital shifts in popular culture. Hart, who\u2019s trying to have a more functional relationship with alcohol, is in a defeated hangdog mode at Sardi\u2019s Bar in Midtown, awaiting his old partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and his entourage as they celebrate the theatrical premiere of Oklahoma! There are three key portions of the screenplay, which gladly don\u2019t equate to a rigid, three-act structure: an introduction where we learn of Hart\u2019s inconsistent genius and many personal limitations; an emotive reunion with Rodgers (who will still collaborate with him, though not as a primary partner) and sincere congratulatory handshake to his lyricist replacement Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney); and an intimate duologue with young proteg\u00e9 Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whose incandescent appeal for him challenges the homosexual identity he comfortably inhabits.\u00a0<\/p>\n