Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon offers a poignant, poetic farewell to a forgotten genius

Once dubbed the voice of the “slacker” generation, Richard Linklater continues to defy categorization with Blue Moon, a masterfully intimate character study that ranks among his finest works. Following a career that has ranged from the philosophical (Waking Life) to the musical (School of Rock) to the epochal (Boyhood), Linklater returns with a melancholic, richly textured portrait of lyricist Lorenz Hart — the brilliant but troubled wordsmith behind some of the Great American Songbook’s most enduring standards.

Set entirely over one night — March 31, 1943 — Blue Moon takes place at Sardi’s, the legendary New York restaurant, while just down the street, Oklahoma! premieres to thunderous applause. That triumph for composer Richard Rodgers, now partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II, marks not just a new chapter for Broadway, but the beginning of the end for Hart, his former collaborator and co-architect of musical theatre classics. Within months, Hart would be dead.

But Linklater isn’t interested in biopic conventions or historical milestones. Instead, Blue Moon is a chamber piece — more elegy than drama — that lets Hart’s voice, wit, and emotional wounds take center stage.

Ethan Hawke stuns as Lorenz Hart

At the heart of the film is a career-best performance by Ethan Hawke, a Linklater regular who fully disappears into the role of Hart. Physically altered and emotionally exposed, Hawke plays the lyricist as a man acutely aware of his fading relevance and deepening loneliness. With cutting humor and lyrical grace, he delivers monologues that blend personal confession with literary elegance — a performance that is both show-stopping and quietly devastating.

Hawke’s Hart is sardonic, self-effacing, and endlessly quotable. “I’ve written a handful of words that are going to cheat death,” he says, citing lines from “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the titular “Blue Moon.” His barbed observations — about art, America, and the Broadway machine — are layered with sadness, especially when he reflects on Oklahoma!’s instant success. “It’s a fraudulent portrait of America,” he declares, lamenting the loss of irony and emotional complexity in musical theatre’s new golden age.

An evening of small mercies

As the night unfolds, Hart holds court with a handful of bar patrons, including a sympathetic bartender (a warm, understated Bobby Cannavale), writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), and a young Yale student, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), with whom Hart shares a brief but meaningful connection. Their exchanges — drawn from real correspondence — reveal Hart’s deep aesthetic appreciation for beauty, less romantic than reverent.

The film’s structure is deceptively simple: one night, one room, one man in decline. But within that narrow frame, Linklater crafts something deeply humane and quietly profound. The conversations drift between caustic humor and painful introspection, creating a kind of living eulogy. The small circle of characters becomes, in effect, a stand-in for an audience watching a man take his final bow — not with grand gestures, but with wit, grace, and an aching need to be remembered.

A lyricist’s lament — and a filmmaker’s tribute

Adapted by Robert Kaplow, who previously collaborated with Linklater on Me and Orson Welles, the screenplay honors Hart’s unique voice, capturing his love of language and his deep vulnerability. The film is less a biopic than a meditation — a quiet exploration of what it means to leave something behind through art.

If Linklater’s other fall release, Nouvelle Vague, is expansive and filled with cinematic legends, Blue Moon is its intimate mirror: a dimly lit requiem for a man who wrote himself into the history of American music — and then was forgotten. It’s not just a portrait of Lorenz Hart, but a tender elegy for every artist who tried to “cheat death” by finding the perfect phrase.

Verdict:
Blue Moon is a graceful, literate, and emotionally resonant film that showcases Richard Linklater’s gifts at their most mature. Anchored by Ethan Hawke’s revelatory performance, it’s a love letter to lost voices, to the art of lyricism, and to the fleeting beauty of a well-lived — and deeply felt — night.