In 2025, the writer/director Richard Linklater debuted two new features about revolutionary artists at vital junctures of their respective careers. Nouvelle Vague (which comes to these shores in early 2026) captures the irrepressible creative zeal of Jean-Luc Godard and his ragtag crew while making Breathless on the streets of Paris. Blue Moon, meanwhile, captures a giant of early-20th-century musical theatre en route to the gutter.
It’s March 31, 1943, and the soon-to-be-canonical Broadway smash, ‘Oklahoma!’, has just premiered to rave reviews. We join the diminutive lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) as he props up the bar at the New York thesp haunt Sardi’s. His viperish assessment confirms that he is no fan of what he sees as earnest, audience-pandering romanticism. ‘Oklahoma!’, it transpires, is a new work by Hart’s long-time musical partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), who has chosen to work with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney). Hart is sour that he is no longer the focus of industry plaudits, yet half- heartedly attempts to hide his scorn. The story identifies this moment as a turning point in Hart’s career, where his catty manner and rampant alcoholism have made him a professional liability, and there’s a sense that an exasperated Rodgers almost sees this as revenge for so much unbecoming behaviour.
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Hawke plays Hart as a raconteur and wit, a saucy barfly whose lack of self control and easy recourse to deception and self-depreciation recalls Ray Milland’s character in the 1945 alcoholism drama, The Lost Weekend. It’s an appealing character turn that never attempts to apologise for Hart’s challenging personality, much more than mere learnt tics and accent work, and a real immersion in the (lost) soul of an artist out of time. There’s also excellent work from Bobby Cannavale as world-weary barman Eddie, who humours and enables the self-destructive Hart while offering him some much needed camaraderie along with the hooch.
The film is talky and stagebound, yet cinematographer Shane F Kelly manages to create pockets of intrigue within the layout of the bar. Hart talks the ear off of anyone who will listen, including an exasperated EB White, who’s just in for a few quiet ones. Its eventual dramatic crux takes the form of a hoped-for bunk-up with a young student (Margaret Qualley), but there’s been far too much clunky foreshadowing put in place for the outcome to be a surprise. Unfortunately, about halfway in, the film becomes an exercise in ritual humiliation, with Linklater and the screenwriter Robert Kaplow piling up the indignities at an almost metaphorically swift rate, as if to assure the viewer that our charismatic hero is most definitely done for.
There are points here where it feels as if Linklater was trying to make a gender-switched version of Fassbinder’s tragic The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, but without really leaning into the forceful bitterness and agency of the protagonist, and opting to have the text make a more profound point about the precarious nature of power and influence.