Blue Moon – the Film

The last days of lyricist Lorenz Hart weren’t pretty ones. He’d penned the lyrics for numerous Broadway hits including “Blue Moon,” Ship Without a Sail," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Falling in Love with Love," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "He Was Too Good to Me," "I Could Write a Book," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," "Isn't It Romantic?" "It Never Entered My Mind," "Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Thou Swell" and "With a Song in My Heart." He was overflowing with ingenious phrases, tending toward the humorous, the satirical, and the self-depreciatory, making him the perfect collaborator for the often shmaltzy tunesmith Richard Rodgers, six years his junior. 

But Larry was unreliable, difficult to work with. He drank, he slept in, he missed appointments. When Rodgers proposed a new musical called “Oklahoma!,” Hart rejected it, considering it utter cornball. So Rodgers moved ahead with a new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, who hadn't written a hit since Showboat, a decade earlier.

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater focuses on one particular evening: the opening night of Oklahoma! Hart attends the show with his mother, then hurries down to the bar nearby where the reception is set to take place. In the course of the evening he chats with the worldly-wise bartender, the young soldier at the piano, and E. B. White (who happens to be sitting at a table nearby.) He tells the bartender about his “girlfriend,” a attractive coed twenty years his junior, and the language gets crude. She’ll be arriving soon. Hart has promised to introduce her to Rodgers.

Guests start to trickle in from the theater, including Hammerstein and Rodgers himself. By this time Hart has had a few drinks, and he’s getting slightly manic. He congratulates Hammerstein, then Rodgers, things remain cordial, and Rodgers even goes so far as to suggest a new collaboration with Hart, an update of the duo’s first show, now fifteen years in the past.

OK, Hart replies, but why not do a new show? A satire about Marco Polo. Four hours long. “We’ll skewer everything and everybody …. “

It’s painful to watch the evening unfold. Ethan Hawke inhabits the role of Hart with all the exuberance and pathos he can muster, but it’s never fun to watch an alcoholic head down that slippery slope to inebriation. Andrew Scott, in the role of Rodgers, nails the complex blend of gratitude, affection, courtesy, and distaste that the songwriter feels for his one-time mentor, collaborator, and friend. And Margaret Qualley is perfect as the worldly-wise yet strangely innocent ingénue who’s truly fond of her much older and much more famous friend, though she doesn’t care for him “in that way.”

It isn’t difficult to guess who’s going to get the girl.

But that's not the point of the film. Linklater wanted to bring to life a fascinating and dreadful moment in the history of American popular culture, and in that he's succeeded. 

It almost makes you want to stream Oklahoma! again. 

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For deeper insights into the art and milieu of the Great American Songbook, I would highly recommend Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built. For an almost academic look at the lyricists of the era, including forty-odd pages on Hart himself, it might be worthwhile checking out The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia.