{"id":262690,"date":"2025-10-31T10:44:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T10:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/262690\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T10:44:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T10:44:12","slug":"blue-moon-shows-ethan-hawke-unlike-youve-ever-seen-him-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/262690\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Moon shows Ethan Hawke unlike you\u2019ve ever seen him before."},"content":{"rendered":"

The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. Ray<\/a>, for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles\u2019 1960 recording of \u201cGeorgia on My Mind<\/a>\u201d? Last year\u2019s A Complete Unknown<\/a> featured a superb Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold\u2019s well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s A-Gonna Fall<\/a>.\u201d Every so often, a truly original filmmaker will tell the story of another artist\u2019s life and creative process in such a way as to create a freestanding masterpiece: Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s Andrei Rublev<\/a>, Max Oph\u00fcls\u2019 Lola Mont\u00e8s<\/a>, Mike Leigh\u2019s Mr.\u00a0Turner<\/a> and Topsy-Turvy<\/a>, Jane Campion\u2019s Bright Star<\/a> and An Angel at My Table<\/a> (Leigh and Campion being among the rare directors to have pulled this feat off twice). But something about the biopic\u2019s necessary subservience to the historical record of its subject\u2019s life and work often consigns entries in this genre to middlebrow or even kitsch status.<\/p>\n

In two sprightly new films out this October, writer-director Richard Linklater has found an idiosyncratic way to escape this biopic trap. Blue Moon, about a single night late in the life of the great mid-20th-century lyricist Lorenz Hart, and Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s 1960 debut feature Breathless<\/a>, each proposes in its own way the notion of the biopic as an act of criticism. Linklater\u2019s evident admiration for the work of these artists has led him to make two films that set out to show audiences not necessarily who Hart and Godard were as human beings (we never see either at home, for example) but why we should care about the work they made, those songs and movies that are still actively shaping how we see and hear our world, whether we\u2019re aware of their influence or not.<\/p>\n

The films could be seen as contrapuntal companion pieces that play out their related themes in separate but complementary rhythms. Nouvelle Vague darts forward at the effervescent pace of the cultural youth movement it chronicles, while Blue Moon ambles and digresses, casting the occasional rueful backward glance at an earlier and more fulfilling time in its middle-aged hero\u2019s declining career. The characters of Hart, as played by Linklater\u2019s longtime creative collaborator Ethan Hawke, and Godard, as played by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck\u2014a professional photographer making his first appearance in a feature film\u2014have some important qualities in common. Distinct though their styles are, they share an irreverent wit and a keen awareness of their own outsider status in the entertainment industry. Both men display a chip-on-the-shoulder confidence that barely masks a deep insecurity. Both relate to their surroundings and to their work with an uneasy mix of romantic idealism and self-protective sarcasm. Above all, both are driven by the sense that the art form they love, and to which they each believe they have a unique contribution to make, is failing to live up to the standards they insist on holding it to. Hart\u2019s introspective melancholy and Godard\u2019s restless kineticism are presented as equally valid modes of approaching the creative process, one suited to youth, the other to age.<\/p>\n

\n As Lorenz Hart, Ethan Hawke gives the most transformative performance of his career thus\u00a0far.\n<\/p>\n

Of the two movies, Blue Moon feels like the more major entry in the director\u2019s filmography, if only because it marks a new epoch in his ever-evolving partnership with Hawke. For more than a decade, the two have been reading over and talking about the script by Robert Kaplow, a novelist and former high school English teacher whose book Me and Orson Welles<\/a> Linklater adapted to the screen in 2008. When Linklater first brought the script to Hawke, they agreed the actor was too young to play the lyricist, who on the day the film is set\u2014March\u00a031, 1943, the date of the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma!\u2014is 47 years old, and a particularly careworn and alcohol-soaked 47 at that. But even as Hawke was aging in front of the camera over the course of Linklater\u2019s decades-sprawling Before trilogy<\/a> and the even more time-bending, 12-years-in-the-making experiment Boyhood<\/a>, the actor was growing both physically and artistically into the performer who could take on Lorenz Hart, the most transformative role of his career thus far.<\/p>\n

Even in the most demanding of Hawke\u2019s performances\u2014I\u2019m thinking of his searing turn as a tormented priest in the great Paul Schrader drama First Reformed<\/a>\u2014we\u2019re used to seeing the actor as some variation of himself: scruffy, earnest, somehow boyish even deep into adulthood, a slightly more grizzled version of the handsome leading man he played in Gen\u00a0X comedies like Reality Bites or, yes, Before Sunrise. The character he inhabits here is a radical shift away from that territory. Hart was a tiny man, around 5 feet tall, and his self-consciousness about his height, his thinning hair, and his generally unprepossessing appearance permeates every moment of Hawke\u2019s time on-screen. (Linklater, Hawke, and the crew worked with Latham Gaines, a friend and former collaborator of Hawke\u2019s billed in the credits as the film\u2019s \u201cheight wizard,\u201d to create the illusion of Hart\u2019s small stature using practical effects<\/a> that included trenches dug into the soundstage.) Hart was also a gay man\u2014albeit one who experienced painful crushes on women as well, and proposed marriage to three of them\u2014at a time when queer desire had to be spoken of in code even in the milieu of New York musical theater. Hawke\u2019s performance conveys all that: Hart\u2019s discomfort in his own body, his internalized homophobia and alcoholic self-destructiveness, but also the deep joy he finds in language (he\u2019s always pausing to note his approval of individual word choices, many of them his own), in music, and in all forms of beauty.<\/p>\n

Blue Moon takes place in a single location in just under two hours of real time; in essence, it\u2019s the story of a man sitting in a bar (the venerable Broadway watering hole Sardi\u2019s) over the course of one evening, alternately charming and boring whoever he encounters with a steady stream of observational chatter and self-deprecating wit. But Kaplow\u2019s script neatly avoids both claustrophobia and staginess, dividing the story into three discrete acts. First, in a nearly empty bar, Hart puts on his one-man show for the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), the house pianist (Jonah Lees), and another bar patron (Patrick Kennedy), a quietly observant fellow who turns out to be the New Yorker essayist and children\u2019s book author E.B. White. Then\u2014after briefly greeting his latest object of unrequited longing, a Yale sophomore named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) who\u2019s arrived to help set up the after-party for Oklahoma!\u2019s opening night\u2014Hart has an extended encounter with his longtime songwriting partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), fresh from the glowing reception of his first musical co-written with Oscar Hammerstein\u00a0II (Simon Delaney).<\/p>\n

The audience, watching in 2025, knows that Rodgers and Hammerstein will go on to become the most successful musical-theater duo of the next half-century. Hart, too, with a clarity born of his own self-loathing, senses that his moment in the spotlight has passed. Hammerstein\u2019s broader, more sentimental lyrics, with their \u201ccorn as high as an elephant\u2019s eye\u201d\u2014a line from Oklahoma! that Hart quotes to White with a shudder\u2014have picked up the baton from Hart\u2019s intricate, internally rhymed lines (\u201cI\u2019m wild again\u00a0\/ Beguiled again\u00a0\/ A simpering, whimpering child again\u201d). The melancholy urbanity that makes songs like \u201cMy Funny Valentine,\u201d \u201cI Didn\u2019t Know What Time It Was,\u201d and \u201cIsn\u2019t It Romantic?\u201d now sound like timeless classics was precisely what made them seem dated at the height of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

In Blue Moon\u2019s final act\u2014though the three sections flow into each other seamlessly, with no clean breaks in between\u2014Hart and his coed crush withdraw into the Sardi\u2019s coatroom for a private moment that\u2019s less romantic than it is conspiratorial. For me, this stretch was the weakest part of the movie, mainly because Qualley seems profoundly miscast in the role of Elizabeth (a character based on a real-life college student with whom Hart maintained a correspondence<\/a>). Her character is meant to be 20 years old, with artistic ambitions but little experience; Qualley, on the other hand, is 31 years old, with all the poise of the gorgeous movie star she is. This isn\u2019t exactly a critique of Qualley\u2019s performance: I just wish that Linklater, who has often shown himself to be adept at casting unknown and sometimes nonprofessional actors in major roles (think of Ellar Coltrane, the unforgettable child-to-teenager star of Boyhood) had sought out a less famous face, someone who came across less as a sexy and self-possessed woman than as a brash and precocious but still-unformed girl. When Qualley\u2019s Elizabeth entertains the enthralled Hart by recounting her botched hookup with an oafish frat boy, it\u2019s hard to imagine the commanding young woman she presents as having such an abject sexual experience.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Ellin Stein
\n The Greatest Divorce in Broadway History Is the Subject of a New Movie. But Was It Really That Brutal?
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Be that as it may, Hart\u2019s age-inappropriate crush on Elizabeth is not reciprocated, remaining in the realm of idealized courtly love. Hart\u2019s passing fixation on this particular young woman, we\u2019re led to see, is just one symptom of the self-destructive romanticism that has also contributed to his alcoholism, an addiction that\u2014as we know from the heartrending flash-forward with which the movie opens\u2014will very soon put an end to both his songwriting career and his life.<\/p>\n

The conversation between youth and age is also a major theme in Nouvelle Vague, even though virtually every character in the movie is young; the figure who observes their antics from the wiser but sadder perspective of middle age is none other than the off-screen Linklater. (The script is by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, adapted and translated into French by Mich\u00e8le Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson.) Indeed, the studiedly laconic Godard, whom we first catch sight of watching a movie in the black sunglasses he never removes, is ashamed to be the late bloomer in his cinephile circle, having not yet made a feature film at the advanced age of 28. Witnessing the success of his friend Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), with The 400 Blows, at the Cannes film festival\u2014a trip he steals money from the Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma petty-cash box to make\u2014the apparently unbothered but secretly competitive Godard vows to scare up the minimal budget needed to make a movie that, as he brashly assures his concerned producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyf\u00fcrst), will change the course of film history.<\/p>\n

\n Nouvelle Vague goes down as easy as a caf\u00e9 cr\u00e8me at a standup counter, and provides a bigger burst of\u00a0energy.\n<\/p>\n

True, Godard has no shooting script to speak of, asks his cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) to use a camera so noisy it rules out the possibility of synced sound, and observes a work schedule so chaotic that the director sometimes sends his cast and crew home after getting just one shot, or blows off a whole day of filming to play pinball alone in a caf\u00e9. But the producers, like Godard\u2019s initially dubious cast and crew, begin to see the method in this headstrong young man\u2019s madness once he finally assembles the \u201cgirl and a gun\u201d that, in his own formulation, are all that\u2019s needed to make a movie. The filming of Breathless took place mainly in the streets of Paris, without permits from the city, in a guerrilla-style rush that lends the film its jagged, electric energy.<\/p>\n

What we see here are the moments just before and after Coutard\u2019s noisy camera begins to roll, as stars Jean-Paul Belmondo (played by dead ringer Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (marvelously embodied by Zoey Deutch) struggle to comprehend the demands of their mercurial director. Why does he want them to read long literary passages into the camera and re-create their favorite moments in Humphrey Bogart movies? Seberg in particular, fresh from working with the notoriously overbearing Otto Preminger, is unsettled by her new director\u2019s lack of concern with such trifles as continuity editing and scripted dialogue. A late scene in which the crew shoots Breathless\u2019 ending includes a sly speculation that the movie\u2019s closing image emerged from a conflict between actress and director, with Seberg\u2019s ambiguous improvised gesture winning the day over Godard\u2019s more downbeat suggestion.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Novel Was Less Than Impressive. The New TV Adaptation Is a Big Improvement.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Fact and What\u2019s Fiction in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A Chilling Netflix Documentary Has Become Streaming\u2019s Biggest Hit. I\u2019m Not Sure That\u2019s a Good Thing.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

America\u2019s Greatest Living Filmmaker Does His Best Work in a Much-Criticized Genre
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Filmed in black and white in the old-fashioned 1:37 \u201cAcademy ratio,\u201d with the atmosphere of mid-20th-century Paris impeccably re-created by means of too-subtle-to-spot digital effects, Nouvelle Vague is an hour-and-45-minute-long bagatelle that goes down as easy as a caf\u00e9 cr\u00e8me at a standup counter, and provides a bigger burst of energy. Linklater has fun pastiching some of Godard\u2019s signature stylistic techniques (the choppy edits, the direct-to-camera gaze), and the dialogue, all in French, pingpongs along with the deadpan rapidity of early French New Wave. A crabby critic might note that the dramatic action in Nouvelle Vague lacks meaningful conflict; after all, everyone watching in 2025 knows that Godard is indeed making a masterpiece that will change film history, so whatever confrontations he has with producers, cast, and crew along the way come off as fairly low-stakes squabbles. But Nouvelle Vague is less a dramatization of the act of shooting Breathless than it is a celebration of youthful cinematic ambition\u2014the same divine madness that sent the 29-year-old Linklater on an equally permit-less journey through the streets of Austin to shoot his own medium-reinventing breakthrough movie Slacker<\/a>. Nouvelle Vague is an affectionate portrait of the artist as a young nutjob with absolute faith in his vision, and an invitation for creators of all kinds to believe in their own similarly implausible dreams. To borrow a phrase from Lorenz Hart\u2014one that would apply just as well to the movie Linklater made about and for him\u2014it\u2019s a funny valentine.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[45709,88,594,206,216,138192],"class_list":{"0":"post-262690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-biopics","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-portrait-mode"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}