Here’s Ethan Hawke, of all people, giving a performance that makes you do a double take—wait, is that really him?
In Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” which is earning strong reactions out of Telluride and TIFF after its March premiere at Berlin, Hawke crawls inside Lorenz Hart, the tiny, tormented, alcoholic genius who could write songs like no other and drink like no one should. Sporting a balding comb-over, it’s the kind of casting that shouldn’t work on paper—but it does, gloriously, in fact.
The film locks us in with him for one night in 1943, as Hart watches his old partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott, smugly magnificent) triumphantly premiering “Oklahoma!”—with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney, politely inoffensive).
The concept is simple: Hart sits at the bar at Sardi’s, keeping the liquor flowing and the wise-ass jokes rolling. The brilliance, however, is in how the jokes sour, how his psyche continues to curdle into self-disgust as the night goes on.
Hawke shouldn’t work in this role—he’s too rangy, too sunny, too Texan—but he does, magnificently. He makes Hart’s bitterness both pitiful and exhilarating, a drunk’s spiral turned into a cabaret act from hell. In a career marked by strong roles (“First Reformed,” “Before Sunset,” “Training Day”), this might just be the performance of his career.
Richard Linklater directs “Blue Moon” with the lightest of touches, as if he knows the material is heavy enough without any directorial overreach. He’s now delivered two strong films this year, the other being “Nouvelle Vague.”
And yet, what you come away with is Hawke: sly, shattered, swaggering—an actor who’s been warming up for decades suddenly stepping up to the plate and knocking the thing out of the ballpark. He deserves all the accolades for this brilliantly unhinged performance.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.