Blue Moon

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set

actor Ethan Hawke

Lorenz Hart/Ethan Hawke

Richard Rodgers/Andrew Scott

BLUE MOON            B                                                                                                             USA  Ireland  (100 mi)  2025  d: Richard Linklater

It’s like, well, perhaps a Rodgers and Hart song, kind of beautiful and super sad and forlorn and all those things too.  A catchy tune where you’re devastated by the end.                              —Richard Linklater describing his film

While the film doesn’t have the romantic scope of his Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), where the first two are among the best romantic love stories of the modern era, thriving on the spontaneity of the moment, he’s also made films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), which feel like anthems to childhood, as well as the mind-bogglingly funny Hit Man (2023), yet this is something different altogether, with Linklater releasing two films at the same time, an ode to the French New Wave from Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960) in Nouvelle Vague, and this 1940’s tribute to songwriter/lyricist Lorenz Hart.  Working again with Ethan Hawke for the first time since the Before Trilogy in what is essentially an elegiac character study in a film about art, artists, and meaning, this is a chamber drama revealing the dark sides of success, a biographical drama that focuses on a crucial night in Hart’s life, where what stands out is the heavily staged theatricality, with nearly the entire film taking place in real time at one location, a national landmark in Sardi’s restaurant, a historical spot in the heart of New York’s theater district, considered the toast of Broadway for more than 100 years.  Yet that’s simply the backdrop for what amounts to a non-stop, heavily-scripted discourse out of the mouth of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, nearly unrecognizable with a slick comb-over), a tortured artist who is deeply hurt by what he views as a betrayal from his longtime partner and friend, Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), among the best composers of American musical theater, who decided instead to work with a different writing partner, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and lo and behold they turn out the biggest hit of Rogers’ career in Oklahoma!, a kitschy portrait of Americana that completely revolutionized musical theater in the early 1940’s by integrating songs, dances, and plot.  For Hart this is tragic, as he hates the musical they’ve created, pandering wholesomeness to overly white audiences, creating a completely inaccurate and inauthentic portrait of America, missing the humanity of the human soul, but the upbeat songs are catchy and audiences seem to love it.  Hart leaves the theater early and wanders into a nearly empty Sardi’s restaurant before the theater crowd comes crashing in, where this is a very dialogue-heavy work, as the camera remains almost exclusively in the bar, and the plot is driven by sprawling conversations and monologues that thematically jump back and forth with the bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and lounge player “Knuckles” (Jonah Lees) clinking on the piano, whose musical selections often compliment whatever the hell Hart is babbling about, beautifully evoking the era of the 1940’s.  That pretty much defines the picture, as the closeted gay Hart is a chatty Cathy, as they say, as he philosophizes and mocks, blasphemes and complains, lectures and analyzes, while catching the attention of whoever is sitting within earshot, told in a frenetic, screwball-comedy pace, where the entire film captures his every syllable, where he just goes on endlessly about everything under the sun to whoever is willing to listen, raising profound questions about the nature of art, the price of success, and the transience of fame.  But viewers may space out after a while, finding a bitterly exposed Hart a bit too much, while it can also become tedious and repetitious, with witty yet heavy-handed dialogue that doesn’t have the naturalness and light-as-a-feather airiness of a Linklater-written script, which makes all the difference in the world, and can instead feel forced down our throats, with few, if any, pauses to offer a moment of relief.  While there have been other successful musical biopics, like Mike Leigh’s TOPSY-TURVY (1999), Taylor Hackford’s RAY (2004), James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love (2024), this feels more like a one-man play, with the suffocating presence of Hart onscreen for nearly every shot.  Linklater doesn’t sanitize Hart’s addiction or despair, yet never loses sight of the brilliance behind his pain, as snippets of his songs drift through scenes like ghosts, reminders that even as Hart’s life crumbled, his words have endured.

If Hart ever imagined his life as a stage play, hurling words like thunderbolts, or exploding bombs, then the rest of the cast are just silent extras.  Often feeling like we’re in the middle of a Woody Allen movie, packed with textual cross-references, self-deprecating jokes, and sardonic commentaries, and just a touch of self-reflection, with wall-to-wall piano music of American standards and screwball comedy dialogue spewed fast and furiously, Hart is an alcoholic plagued by self-doubt, yet is recently sober, attempting to retrieve the essential purpose of his life that he feels has been dumped on the curb, already considered a has-been, as Rogers has found himself another successful partner, who’s much easier to deal with, by the way, making him the odd man out.  Nonetheless, whether he’s raving about the best line in the movie Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942), Bogart’s “Nobody ever loved me that much,” another wartime film about two men and a girl, sharing many of the same thematic connections of a bar, friendship, dashed hopes, and a melancholy finale where the protagonist is left behind, or whether anyone else knows just how terrible Oklahoma! is, with its ridiculous use of an exclamation point to draw attention to itself, Hart is a force of nature waxing eloquently about the unequivocal allure of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley as a blond, a baffling choice, since she’s a decade older), a Yale art student who just turned 20, hoping for a career as a production designer.  After months of correspondence and a mysteriously beautiful (for him) yet unconsummated weekend, he believes this may be the night to finally win her love, where he’s planning a grand soirée afterwards, hiring a string quartet, and even inviting the delivery boy in what he promises will be a memorable evening.  Eddie is confused (as are we), believing Hart prefers the company of men, but Hart defies all expectations, claiming he is “omnisexual,” with the film all but ignoring any hidden homoerotic tension, which CASABLANCA was filled with, by the way, if you believe Hart.  For a gay figure, the film strangely and mysteriously devotes a considerable amount of time to a heterosexual relationship, which may reflect the depths of his own existential loneliness.  Describing Elizabeth as his protégée and muse, suggesting she’s too sexy and smart for boys her own age, he goes on a rhapsodic rant about how much she means to him, suggesting it might be love, despite their age difference.  It sounds like a pipe dream, one of those long-winded alcoholic excursions of prosaic virtuosity in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, as Hart is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, where his alcohol-fueled tirades are a mask for his deeply repressed insecurities, basically an open book for anyone to read, yet reality rarely lives up to those long suppressed hopes, which are so easily dashed in an instant.  Off in a corner he spots E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a fellow writer who also has a clever and witty way with words, where their dialogue together is an endless stream of carefully calculated phrases where every word is aptly grandiose, filled with underlying meaning, as the two effortlessly hit it off.  Nonetheless, Hart singlehandedly holds court for the first half of the film, sneaking a shot of bourbon every now and then to bolster his courage, tossing off philosophical maxims like “How can you give voice to the whole world if you don’t have the whole world inside of you?,” gearing up to meet the eye of the storm when all the theater well-wishers show up in an entourage surrounding Richard Rogers, all offering unanimous praise, claiming it’s the greatest musical of all time, with Hart forced to offer his own disingenuous congratulations in this chorus of effusive praise.  Probably the weakest aspect of the film is the digital cinematography by Shane F. Kelly, a Linklater regular since A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), but it lacks spatial depth, never really capturing the claustrophobic, closed-in feeling of the room, often having the artificial staginess of a filmed play.  

Having worked together for more than 20 years from the 20’s to the 40’s, writing 28 stage musicals together, along with over 500 songs, Rogers can see through Hart’s obvious disdain for Oklahoma!, yet he’s willing to set that aside in the interest of being magnanimous, having put up with all of Hart’s emotionally insecure mood swings and alcoholic doldrums for all those years, where he was simply a pain in the ass to work with, always flying off the handle, something of a drama queen grabbing all the attention, while he was left with doing the hard work.  Nonetheless, he offers him a chance to write a few new songs for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, their successful musical from 1927, but Hart is more interested in his delirious idea about creating a grand musical spectacle around adventurer Marco Polo, which sounds like an exotic journey into the strange and undiscovered lands of King Kong (1933), filled with the same kind of extravagance.  “It’s the thrill of a lifetime,” which he believes is infinitely more interesting than the homogenized and overly predictable Oklahoma!  “Who wants inoffensive art?” he exclaims at one point, but the war years may have taken a toll, with a weary nation preferring something more safe and conventional.  While the ever-eccentric Hart is stealing his limelight, Rogers calmly returns to his party of well-wishers, reminding him to think about the new songs.  While Ethan Hawke’s deliberately showy performance of Hart is the centerpiece of the film, breathing life into the role, something should be said for the saintly grace shown by Rogers (Scott won the Best Supporting Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival), and the endless patience on display, shown through a myriad of changing facial expressions, where it’s clear their paths are on different trajectories, as he looks so effortlessly polite in such an obviously uncomfortable situation, moving his way upstairs to an afterparty that leaves Hart behind.  As an aside, Hart also meets a young Hammerstein prodigy dressed in a tuxedo named Stephen (Cillian Sullivan), a foreshadowing reference to Stephen Sondheim, who would go on to redefine Broadway musicals with his virtuosic wordplay while also introducing darker themes, becoming theater's most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, and just happens to be the subject of Linklater’s next project, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, which will be filmed over the course of the next 20 years, with actors aging naturally, not to be confused by the upcoming holiday release by the same name.  By the time Elizabeth shows up, Hart is all aflutter, his nerves on edge, yet his manners are impeccable, as he curiously gives her all of the attention, wanting to hear everything since they last met, as he’s all ears, literally hanging on every word.  While she’s flattered by his near-obsessional infatuation, coming from a man who is more than twice her age, she makes it clear her interest is “not in that way.”  Perhaps the title of the film says it all, as this is not some sunny remembrance, but is instead a collision course between the high-wire act of being a celebrated artist who may already be on a downward spiral, but just doesn’t realize that yet, and the inescapable success of his ex-partner, who along with Oscar Hammerstein would go on to become the greatest writing team in American musical history, leaving Hart behind as yesterday’s news.  It’s a savagely despairing story written by Robert Kaplow, whose novel was the source material for Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008), adapting the material from Hart’s letters that he wrote to an unidentified woman named Elizabeth, which Kaplow bought at an estate sale, accentuating the ups and downs that occur in the ever-evolving life of a melancholic artist, becoming a mournful tale of a man whose career was cut too short, with Ethan Hawke capturing the contradictions of his character, where everything is secondary to his performance, whose heightened mood swings have a profoundly dark emotional impact. Described at the beginning of the movie as “the saddest man I ever knew,” one of three quotations from companions who draw a picture of a sociable but devastatingly lonely person, within seven months Hart would drunkenly collapse in a rain-soaked back alley and die (which is actually the opening sequence, with a radio broadcast obituary playing over it), with Linklater deserving credit for generously reviving his spirit in this Irish wake-like, tragicomic sendoff, where, perhaps coincidentally, the film was actually shot in Ireland, specifically in and around Dublin, recalling, of course, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).            

2024 Top Ten List #2 All of Us Strangers

Writer/director Andrew Haigh

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott

Haigh on the set with Paul Mescal

Haigh with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay

ALL OF US STRANGERS                  A                                                                                 Great Britain  USA  (105 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Andrew Haigh

Little things I should have said and done, I never took the time.                                                  —Always On My Mind, The Pet Shop Boys, 1987

British-born writer/director Andrew Haigh, creator of Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2016), and Lean On Pete (2017), has crafted his most mature and compelling work, a haunting meditation on loneliness that offers more than a few surprises, emotionally raw and deeply connecting, expressing a unique vulnerability that is brilliantly told, feeling very grown up, where nothing else like it comes to mind, as it really establishes its own unorthodox path, where the reflective originality is literally off the charts without using any cinematic trickery.  What truly stands out is just how achingly personal it is, where every single moment feels heartfelt, and the title tells all, poetically revealing how we all revolve around each other’s lives, like planets in alignment, reminiscent of that spectacular opening sequence in Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), Werckmeister Harmonies (Opening Scene - GR-EN sub) YouTube (10:12).  The degree of complexity in this film is surprising, as it starts out simple enough, with nothing out of the ordinary, where the realist aesthetic becomes ingrained with viewers, setting the tone for what follows, providing the building blocks of an intense theatrical exploration of memory and identity, loosely adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 Tokyo-based novel Strangers, the first recipient of the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, changing the central character to a gay man with the blessing of Yamada (who died recently at the age of 89) and his family, who were incredibly respectful of Haigh’s vision of finding hope in dark places.  At the center of the story is Irish actor Andrew Scott as Adam, a reclusive writer working on a story that has to do with his past and his deceased parents, currently living alone on the 27th floor of a block high-rise building with a panoramic view of the London landscape below, where the clouds on the horizon offer a contemplative vantage point, recalling Sofia Coppola’s far-reaching hotel room vista in Lost in Translation (2002), or the quiet perch in Spike Jonze’s futuristic Her (2013), where the window in each case is a barrier to the world outside.  Despite the massive size of what appears to be a new building, it is strangely deserted, where it comes as a surprise that he is the only one exiting during a fire drill, an incident that allows Adam to spot his only neighbor in a window, Harry (Paul Mescal from 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun), who pays him a visit afterwards in an excessively awkward flirtatious gesture that reveals his off-putting drunken state, with a half-empty bottle of Japanese whisky in his hands, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Do I Scare You” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (54 seconds).  He’s younger and more gregarious, but Adam declines the invitation, as he’s largely a solitary figure, but has second thoughts afterwards, believing there’s something there, and a short time later the two reconnect as gay lovers, where the awkwardness of an initial sexual encounter is everpresent, yet there’s also a heartfelt connection that bonds them together, some of which comes from sharing the difficulties they each encountered from the realization they were gay.  Both are estranged from their families and share the same feeling of alienation and not belonging, with Adam confessing he lost his parents in a car crash thirty years earlier just before he turned twelve years old, with Harry sensing that kind of pain never goes away, leaving Adam suddenly flooded by memories of his past, while Harry is himself trapped by his own struggles with drugs and alcohol.  Rising to the surface are grief and loss, with elements of warmth, melancholy, loneliness, and sorrow, opening a dialogue between the past and the present, something that was previously explored in Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), or more recently Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023).  But this is something different altogether, a profoundly moving experience that may leave some emotionally shattered, becoming a deeply philosophical Proustian essay on the power of love and the power of remembrance.   

Andrew Haigh films are known for being quiet, intimate, well-acted, and intensely real, where the root of them all is an emotional honesty expressed with extraordinary tenderness, where his eloquent use of music and camera movement feels effortlessly fluid and graceful, a bit like Xavier Dolan, luring us into an emotionally devastating fictional world that viewers are suddenly thrust into, as if we’re living it ourselves.  Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, this is another LGBTQ story with a surreal aspect to it, bearing some resemblance to Enys Men (2022), as each is a brilliantly original exposé on loneliness, but things are expressed quite differently, conveyed largely through conversations, with regular bursts of humor in highlighting the absurdities of the situation, where it’s such a deeply personal and imaginative vision that it takes us places where we’ve never been, much of it stemming from the unique architectural blueprint from the Yamada novel.  While stuck on a page that simply reads “External, suburban house, 1987,” this film leaves audiences continually off-balance, as we question what we’re seeing, wondering just what to make of it all, taking place in a netherworld of memory and the imagination, where there’s a textured, indelible sense of pathos running through the entire film, which feels more like a metaphysical experience.  The overall weirdness may not work for everyone, but this is a director at the height of his powers pressing the artistic boundaries in pursuit of something completely different, where it’s a bit of a challenge to keep up with the dizzying turns in the road, but the place he takes us is something to be cherished.  Some twenty or thirty minutes into the film, Haigh pulls the rug out from underneath us, leaving us floating on air in a state of suspended incomprehension and disbelief, where it doesn’t matter if it defies all rational logic, as he instead creates an immensely satisfying alternative universe, with no explanation, and simply leaves us there to fend for ourselves.  While off on a long walk, Adam encounters a strange man (Jamie Bell) and follows him into the suburban neighborhood of Croydon, where we thoroughly expect an anonymous sexual encounter, but once they get to the door, the man happily introduces Adam to his wife (Claire Foy from 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking), only to discover they affectionately call him their son, someone they haven’t seen in a long while, which is an alarming development, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Hi” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (30 seconds).  Viewers are quick to think they may be stepparents, or foster parents, yet the strange thing is there appears to be little difference in their age as they immediately rehash childhood memories, which are in no way idealized or romanticized, but presented matter-of-factly, exposing the obvious discomfort that generation either failed to recognize or ignored.  As mind-blowing as this seems, blurring the boundaries of reality, they’re actually picking up their relationship where it left off decades earlier (“Is this real?” he asks), having conversations with his parents that he never got to have, where they all seem perfectly comfortable with the visit afterwards, as if it was a cathartic experience, which only elevates the emotional authenticity of the reconnection, a very unusual way to tackle the haunting memories of grief and death, like traveling through an invisible portal.  In this ghost story, however, Haigh leaves out any horror or supernatural elements, and rather than being about the dead, it’s about the living communing with the dead, tapping into feelings people didn’t know they had.  In a subsequent visit with just his mother at home, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “You Were Just A Boy” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (2:00), Adam confesses he is openly gay, which hits her like a ton of bricks, not really bringing herself to believe what she hears, as it’s not what she ever envisioned, yet this is the moment every gay kid has with their parents, and it’s completely relatable.    

One of the unlocking keys to the film is viewing the album cover of Welcome to the Pleasuredome by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a pivotal 1980’s album that exploded onto the music scene in a wave of controversy, where the blatant sexuality was groundbreaking, dangerous, and exciting, along with its immersion into gay culture during the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s which took so many innocent young lives.  This film is caught in a time warp, carrying the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the 80’s, battered by the relentless homophobia of the Reagan and Thatcher era where they were meant to feel ashamed and abandoned, as no one cared, where it’s not nostalgia, which can often hide the truth, but the burden of alienation and self-loathing still carried around by generations of grown-up gay children who have been traumatized from the harm done by an unsympathetic mainstream that was not inclined to question or reshape the world around them but simply accept the status quo.  Moving away from the traditional ghost story of the novel, Haigh creates something more psychological and distinctly metaphysical that is intentionally abstract in its revelations.  While the film takes place in a contemporary setting, the sequences when Adam returns to his childhood home to see his parents returns us to a 1980’s version of their world, where time has literally stopped, which has the effect of stepping into a dream, or a hazy, nostalgia-induced memory, where one of the more haunting sequences is a Christmas they spend together, with his mom humming along to an old Elvis tune as they decorate the tree, yet the cover version heard on TV with a gay lead singer has a completely different, more heartbreaking connotation for Adam, Pet Shop Boys - Always on my mind (Official Video) [4k Upgrade] YouTube (5:12).  In order to accentuate the realism and deep personal connection, these scenes were actually shot in Haigh’s childhood home, beautifully expressed on 35mm by cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, with rich colors and evocative lighting, exacerbating a feeling of being out of time, or in spaces inhabited only by the mind, while the eerie, mind-altering electronic musical score was conceived by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.  Haigh explores the complexities of both familial and romantic love, with Harry and Adam, in a moment of joyous abandon, heading out into the world together as a couple, where one of the film’s memorable sequences takes place in a nightclub, shot on location at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, an iconic queer London institution which is entrenched with local history and culture, where the neon-lit color scheme immerses viewers in the richness of a drug-induced experience, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Will You Look After Me?” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (55 seconds), which is a dizzying and terrifying turn, set to the music of Blur’s Death of a Party (2012 Remaster) - YouTube (4:33), where their loneliness mirrors one other, two men adrift, lost souls brought into each other’s lives, trapped by invisible scars that continue to inhibit their ability to connect with others.  Easily one of the more original and important films seen in a while, as it speaks to something that simply isn’t being told elsewhere.  There are wow moments in this film, achieved through exquisite writing and tender emotional restraint, where some of the most stunning moments come from quietly intimate deliveries, where the vast majority of the film’s complexities rest firmly on the shoulders of Adam, where much of the emotional punch comes from the tender, heart-wrenching, and healing bond between Adam and his parents, leading to one of the more powerful finales in recent memory, exemplified by a moment of infinite beauty and the majestic quality of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love - Remastered - 4K - 5.1 Surround YouTube (5:05), suggesting that more than anything our lives revolve around the transcendent importance of relationships and the power of love.       

Andrew Haigh Answers All of My Burning Questions About ' ...  engaging Evan Ross Katz interview from Shut Up Evan, November 7, 2023