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).            

A Complete Unknown

 

Director James Mangold

Dylan in Columbia Studios, 1965

recreation of Cafe Wha? nightclub on MacDougal Street

The director on the set with Timothée Chalamet

The director with Monica Barbaro

Timothée Chalamet on his infamous motorcycle

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN            B                                                                                    USA  (141 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: James Mangold

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?                                                                                                To be without a home                                                                                                                  Like a complete unknown,                                                                                                              Like a rolling stone?                                                                                                                        —excerpt from Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan, 1965, Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone (Live at Newport 1965) YouTube (6:12)

Taking a deep dive back into the early 60’s, which spawned an entire generation, this is essentially a time capsule reflecting the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the Civil Rights movement, where linking it all together was the music and cultural impact of Bob Dylan, as his music was everywhere, literally everywhere you turned at the time, with stories continually being written about him, where he was described as “the voice of a generation.” The first songwriter to win the Nobel prize for literature in 2016 since Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, it’s his prolific output of poetic, counterculture songs that become the focus of the film, not any biographical portrait, but one that allows his enigmatic yet elegiac lyrics to speak for him, many songs allowed to unravel in their entirety, as unlike the traditional lyrics that came before him, his songs and lyrics were highly personal.  Revered and idolized, becoming the poster child for the 60’s counterculture movement with songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963) YouTube (2:35) and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall (5:59) from 1962, Masters of War, Bob Dylan - Masters of War (4:30) from 1963, and The Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan - The Times They Are a-Changin' [LIVE IN ... YouTube (3:28) from 1964, which were able to influence a generation with deeply profound lyrics that blended a stream-of-conscious, image-laden lyricism with the traditional folksy sound.  By the time the free love movement was in full swing in the late 60’s, Bob Dylan's words were anthems for peace, and Dylan had become the voice of a social movement, elevated to an oracle of 1960’s youth culture.  Largely due to his connections with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Dylan embodied the ideals of the folk revival, a young teenage drifter arriving from the Midwest, singing traditional songs he had learned in his travels and writing new songs about the trials, troubles, and tribulations of the world around him, yet most revered were his songs of social consciousness, which were labeled protest songs, a term he disdained, yet as the children of the Sixties tried to crown Bob Dylan their poet laureate, he refused, as he was that rare celebrity who scoffed at all attempts to exaggerate his importance.  He didn’t even play at Woodstock, although he lived there.  In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Dylan complained of how “rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest” showed up in Woodstock.  He said he “had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.” (Newsweek cover: Bob Dylan opens up; Exclusive book excerpt ...).  But like a hipster alienated by his rejection of the mainstream, Dylan remained the voice of a generation precisely by refusing, and what this film brilliantly captures is his essential unknowability, making this a fascinating watch.  Shot in ‘Scope by Phedon Papamichael Jr. on various locations in New Jersey recreating the small clubs in New York’s Greenwich Village of the 60’s, adapted by Mangold and Jay Cocks, who has worked with Martin Scorsese and been a critic for Rolling Stone magazine, from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, an author who earlier wrote How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (2009) and co-authored Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005).  It may come as a surprise to some that more young people today have probably seen actor Timothée Chalamet on social media or in his movies than have ever seen Bob Dylan in his lifetime, which is hard to imagine for a performer who has been playing in front of audiences for over 60 years.  As the film kept getting pushed back from 2020 due to Covid and then the Actors’ strike, it gave Chalamet several years to learn the subtle nuances of not just how to sing and talk like Dylan, fully inhabiting his sullen presence, but also learn to play the guitar and harmonica.

While the definitive Dylan movie remains D. A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back (1967), other contenders are Dylan as an actor in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Martin Scorsese’s exhaustively researched No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), and a few oddball movies like Todd Haynes’ abstract rendition in I’M NOT THERE (2007), which uses multiple actors to portray Dylan’s different public personas without ever mentioning him by name, or showing up rather anonymously where we least expect to find him in the struggling folk scene depicted in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).  While the acting performances are surprisingly good, especially Timothée Chalamet doing his Brandoesque mumbling imitation of Dylan, as his singing while playing guitar on all songs recorded live brings that same rough edge, while in contrast, Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for lip syncing Ray Charles, and Rami Malek won an Oscar for lip syncing Queen’s Freddie Mercury.  Edward Norton is the infinitely likeable, venerable folk legend Pete Seeger, where much of this version of Dylan is seen through his lofty eyes, while Monica Barbaro plays a sensuously feisty version of accomplished folk star Joan Baez, and Elle Fanning is his underappreciated girlfriend of the time Sylvie Russo, based on artist and activist Suze Rotolo, one of the few characters in his inner circle who remained out of the spotlight, seen on the cover of the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and author of the 2008 memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, which was used as source material.  It’s worth mentioning that some of Dylan’s best work was conceived when they were together, as she obviously had a great influence on his state of mind, yet she’s never gotten the credit she deserves for shaping Dylan and his work.  In the two-and-a-half years they dated he wrote most of his overtly political songs, where the politics, in particular, were hers, as her parents were members of the Communist Party, while she was a full-time volunteer with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), the anti-nuclear group SANE, and she also worked on a production of songs by Bertolt Brecht, which made a lasting impact on Dylan’s writing.  While it’s clear she was the inspiration behind some of his best love songs, she also witnessed his complete transformation from a relatively obscure folk performer playing in small, intimate spaces to a massively recognizable celebrity who couldn’t go anywhere in public without being mobbed by frenzied fans, which left her conflicted, as the internalized tension it caused took its toll on their relationship, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN | "One of a Kind" Official Clip ... YouTube (1:14).  The 1960’s were a period of dramatic upheaval, where the optimism of the early decade had been shaken by an escalating series of murders, assassinations, and riots, something this film never addresses, and is instead merely a historical backdrop.  Made by the man who directed the wildly uneven yet fully entertaining Johnny Cash biopic WALK THE LINE (2005) starring Joaquin Phoenix, where we see some stylistic parallels, but the one real disappointment with this movie is the conventional, straightforward manner in which it is told, where it resembles a linear progression of Dylan writing his own music, getting discovered, recording his first album, finding an interesting girlfriend, discovering his new electric sound, clashing with the establishment, so there are no real surprises, though it does take some manufactured artistic liberties, continuing a long line of mythical Hollywood fictionalizations.  While Dylan is an artist in development who remains closely guarded and seemingly impenetrable with a strangely magnetic persona, where his internal world is an open question, hiding behind a self-mythologizing mask of fictionalized construction, which may be frustrating to some, yet even today the man behind the curtain remains an indecipherable mystery that was never meant to be unraveled, so we learn very little about a man this film is ostensibly about.  In Scorsese’s ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW (2019), Dylan is famous for re-iterating a George Bernard Shaw quote, “Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.”  Anyone familiar with his early years can recognize that this movie doesn’t have that sneering intellectual arrogance and disdain that was so prevalent in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back (1967), instead there are early signs of what to expect, including that everpresent motorcycle, which is a character in itself foreshadowing what’s to come (50 years later, Dylan's motorcycle crash remains mysterious).    

In the opening sequence, Dylan (Chalamet) arrives in New York City in search of his boyhood idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNary), who was suffering from Huntington’s Disease, an incurable neurodegenerative disease, unable to control his muscles or speech, visiting him at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where he actually sang a song written specifically for him, A Complete Unknown | "Song To Woody” by Timothée Chalamet YouTube (2:20), with Woody expressing approval by pounding the bedside with his fist.  Also in the room was Pete Seeger, who immediately befriended the young man, introducing him to the folk music scene where his star rises, as evidenced by his act following Joan Baez, but as she was leaving, she stopped to take a listen, utterly flabbergasted by what she was hearing.  They would eventually become lovers, even going on tour together, though by that time it had largely deteriorated into insults or ignoring one another.  But their first night together is memorable, as she immediately sees through his bullshit, though his ability to write lyrics was simply astonishing, Blowin In The Wind Scene | A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024 ... YouTube (4:50).   Much of the film deals with Dylan’s mystique, acerbic and socially awkward, as he’s an enigma that simply cannot be understood, which is essentially the subject of Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back, and that any attempt to do so forces him into yet another epic transformation into something else, where the closest we can get to him is through his music, privileging the craft of songwriting and musical experimentation in a way that few musical biopics ever do.  With wall-to-wall music, this film loads up on scenes of musical performances taking place in bedrooms, hotel rooms, small venues, festivals, and recording sessions, where the effect he had on his generation is staggering, yet mostly he wanted no part of it, losing himself in the process of continually discovering new innovations, not robotically repeating the same songs over and over again, which is what the public wanted, and the blueprint for how stars achieve commercial success.  This conflict is the core of the movie. whether it’s relationships or musical choices, as Dylan felt trapped by his fame, and simply refused to be pigeonholed into what others expected him to be.  He was not interested in being the white knight of his generation, a balladeer who conveniently sang songs for every occasion, spurring social change through the eloquent and often prophetic construction of his lyrics, reflected in the ominous lyric, “He not busy being born is busy dying” from It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) YouTube (7:28).  This film concentrates on a few short early years and ignores the rest, as by the time the film ends he has broken free of all expectations and finally discovered he is on his own, able to sing what he wants with whoever he enjoys playing with, but it came as a shock, like a rupture in an existing reality, which is exactly how he was perceived when he brought electric guitars to the conventionally acoustic Newport Folk Festival in 1965, backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band, instructing them to “play it loud,” described in the book as “the night that split the 60’s.”  “I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them,” sang Dylan on Maggie’s Farm, Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm (Live At Newport Folk Festival ... YouTube (4:59), bringing the house down in a chaotic chorus of boos and catcalls and objects thrown onstage, where even a fight breaks out in this version, exposing the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking new music, where it’s easy to forget that Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had previously played electric sets at Newport that very same weekend, so it was essentially a battle of one nonconformist group against another, a dispute about what it meant to rebel against convention, heralding the death of a leftist movement rooted in progressive folk ideals.  According to Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan triggered “the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation,” ending the set with “Strike another match, go start anew” from a final acoustic song, Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live at the Newport ... YouTube (4:35), but the experience jettisoned him into the future on his own terms, announcing his arrival as a complex, uncompromising artist.            

Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties  Elijah Wald book excerpt from Pitchfork