‘Blue Moon’ Viennale Review: A Witty and Wounded Farewell to Rodgers & Hart’s Lost Poet

Wistful, witty, and tinged with melancholy—much like the lyrics written by its protagonist—Blue Moon is a small, tender portrait of the twilight of an artist’s career and life. Though his name may not be well known today—and that’s precisely part of the film’s point—Lorenz Hart was the lyricist behind many of the enduring standards of the American songbook, written in collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers. Together, they created such unforgettable songs as “My Funny Valentine,” “Manhattan,” “Here in My Arms,” “Dancing on the Ceiling,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “You Are Too Beautiful,” and the film’s namesake, “Blue Moon,” their biggest hit—though one Hart himself reportedly disliked. For him, those songs marked both the beginning and the end of everything. But not for Rodgers, who went on to form a new partnership with Oscar Hammerstein II, creating what would become one of the most celebrated duos in Broadway history.

It’s at that exact turning point that Linklater sets his story, told in real time—except for the opening scene, where we see a drunk Hart (Ethan Hawke) stumbling through the rain and dying. Blue Moon then rewinds to a few months earlier, on March 31, 1943, the night of the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma!, the first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration. Rodgers’s former partner, the tortured, alcoholic Hart, slips out of the theater midway through the show, clearly irritated by what he’s just seen.

The entire film unfolds in Sardi’s, the legendary restaurant and bar where Hart retreats while the musical continues. As was the custom then, the show’s creators will later gather there to celebrate, await the morning papers, and—if the reviews are good—celebrate even harder. But Hart is apart from all that, at least physically. He leans against the bar next to Eddie, the lifelong bartender (Bobby Cannavale), and asks for a drink. Eddie reminds him that he’d sworn off serving him alcohol, but resistance is futile: Lorenz wants, needs, to drink. And the whiskey begins to flow.

Written by Robert Kaplow—the same writer behind Me and Orson Welles, the Linklater film to which this one most closely connects—Blue Moon begins as a series of sharp, ironic, and wounded monologues. Hart talks to Eddie, to the pianist, to a flower delivery boy, even to a nearby writer, about the play he just saw (“No play with an exclamation mark in the title can be any good,” he quips), about his career, about music, and about how the kind of bitter, acid humor that defined his lyrics is being replaced by a softer, more palatable sentimentality—something he cannot abide.

As more people drift in—quite literally, “the party’s just beginning”—Linklater keeps the tone light and breezy, like a screwball comedy from the ’30s or ’40s, while slowly letting darker shades emerge. Hart—gay, though occasionally attracted to women—is waiting for Elizabeth Weiland (a remarkable Margaret Qualley), a beautiful protégé he adores. Before long, the jubilant Oklahoma! team shows up, including Rodgers himself (Andrew Scott), whose outward cordiality masks a certain resentment and an unspoken grief.

Those two relationships—Hart’s with Elizabeth and his fraught connection with Rodgers—anchor the film as the jubilant opening night unfolds around them. We watch as Hart’s career, confidence, and sense of purpose deflate while others bask in success, party, and gently push him aside. Even Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) treats him kindly, but no more than that. A long, quietly devastating scene between Hawke and Qualley becomes the emotional core of the film—the moment when Hart realizes that, to nearly everyone in the room, he’s already a figure of the past.

That sense of bittersweet despair pervades a film that, for much of its running time, plays like a comedy. But, like the songs Hart wrote with Rodgers—and like so many from that era—its charm and sophistication only partly conceal the sorrow underneath. Beneath the wit, the wordplay, the charming patter, lies heartbreak. Hawke’s performance captures that perfectly: his Lorenz Hart is brilliant and funny, but every joke feels like a defense mechanism, every quip laced with pain. Beneath the cleverness, there’s loneliness—and the quiet realization that the party will go on without him.

Linklater’s film also works as a theatrical homage, steeped in the Broadway lore of the 1940s. The famous faces drifting through Sardi’s aren’t mere cameos: the writer Hart chats with turns out to be a young E. B. White, future author of Stuart Little, and the precocious boy who critiques him is—or will become—Stephen Sondheim. Blue Moon clearly dialogues with Linklater’s other 2025 film, Nouvelle Vague. Though they seem worlds apart—the rarefied milieu of American theater and the youthful rebellion of French cinema a decade and a half later—both explore the creative, emotional ecosystems of artists, with their tangled mix of ambition, rivalry, longing, and fear. The difference lies in time: for the French New Wave’s “young Turks,” everything is possibility and future; for Hart, everything is memory. What was—and will never be again.