by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley
Intro:
… dialogue-driven, and touching but intermittently cerebral …
Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) was, for about 24 years, one half of a successful songwriting partnership with Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). Together, they wrote many musicals, which included enduring standards like “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered”, “The Lady is a Tramp”, “My Funny Valentine” — and the titular “Blue Moon”. But then, Rodgers abandoned Hart in favour of Oscar Hammerstein. The first fruit of their collaboration was Oklahoma, and it’s on its opening night in 1943 that this story basically begins.
Hart leaves the premiere to drown his sorrows in a New York bar, and virtually the whole film is set there. It doesn’t matter though, because it’s essentially a vehicle for a tour de force performance by Hawke. Hart is a really complex individual: dizzyingly intelligent and quick-witted, sure of his own brilliance yet also desperately insecure, sad, irrepressible, charismatic, alcoholic, campy (he jocularly refers to himself as ‘’ambisexual”) — and a motormouth. The man almost never stops for breath, and it’s exhausting just to watch, and especially, hear him. But bear with it and you’ll find that the movie develops into quite a rich and emotionally substantial experience.
The point when the drama really goes up a notch involves the young Yale student and aspiring designer Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), about whom Hart professes himself to be “drunk with beauty”. Though everyone else in the cast is fine — when they can get a word in — it’s only Qualley who comes close to upstaging Hawke. (Funnily enough, incidentally, if you closed your eyes and just listened to her, you’d swear that she was Steve Buscemi.) The movie is based on real (and poignant) letters between Weiland and Hart.
If you’re up for something dialogue-driven, and touching but intermittently cerebral, you’ll like Blue Moon.
