‘Blue Moon’ review: Andrew Scott burns, Ethan Hawke clowns in grating biopic

Andrew Scott is a wonder of a modern actor. From Sherlock has Scourge has All of us foreigners And RipleHe burns on the screen. His dark eyes can reflect a murderous intensity or an impious desire, or – in the case of Riple – both. It is not surprising that Scott’s performance in Blue moon He earned the Silver Bear for the best support performance at the 75th International Film Festival in Berlin earlier this year. It’s just a shame for the support role in the last of Richard Linklater.

The star of this unbearable biopic on the American lyricist Lorenz Hart is Ethan Hawke, who previously won the praise of criticisms for his work in Linklater films like The Before Trilogy (Before sunrise, before sunsetAnd Before midnight) And Childhood. Perhaps Hawke deserves accessories for having assumed the role of Hart, because this representation is not only miles from cool but imperfect men that Hawke tends, but light years on their part. Written by Robert Kaplow, the novelist behind Me and Orson Welles, that Linklater adapted in 2008, Blue moon Overcome with the maudlin sentimentality of this lost artist, but lacks depth.

Where Scott’s performance as a creative partner of Hart, the composer Richard Rodgers, shores in his intensity and his authenticity, Hawke’s performance is a clown show, making fun of a musical genius that was tragically overwhelmed by his worst pulses.

Blue moon Feels like an awkward adaptation of a Broadway Off-Off Broadway show.

Most of this film takes place on March 31, 1943, the opening evening of Rodgers and Hammerstein Oklahoma! On Broadway. Holds in box seats while cowboys and farm girls sing happily is Hart, an average age pad with a comb that has long lost the war. As the crowded house applauded, he goes out early, eager to go to Sardi, the emblematic bar where the game will be held.

There, Larry (as he generally approached) hopes to reconnect with Rodgers, with whom he worked for 25 years, creating beloved songs like “The Lady is a tramp”, “My Funny Valentine”, and of course, “Blue Moon”. But Hart can see the abduction of the public that Oklahoma! (“With an exclamation point”, he deplores) could be the end of his partnership with Rodgers, because Hammerstein’s words get a lot of love.

However, before this configuration, Kaplow begins the film with the end of Hart. Drunk, soaked and dying in a dark and rainy alley in New York, Hart collapses alongside a dumpster, pathetic and alone. This image hangs over the entire film as a storm cloud, which makes the search for humor difficult in the desperate attempts of Hart of charm and conversation.

For an unbearable first act, he resolutely blahers to a besieged bartender (Bobby Cannavale), an impatient pianist (Jonah Lees) and a patient boss (Patrick Kennedy). Kaplow throws a biographical background in these exchanges, so not to know much about Hart is not an obstacle. But for all these details, Blue moon is the most interested in three things: Hart was drunk, gay and short.

Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater make a queer clown from Lorenz Hart.

While historians today consider Hart as a queer, he was not public on his sexual orientation in life. However, Kaplow writes to him making gay jokes who use insults and happily qualify as “sucking” at the dismayed right bartender. When he is in a hurry if he likes boys or girls, Larry expresses that as a lyricist, he is “omnisexual”, finding beauty in men, women and horses because it helps his art. So here we are in 2025, confusing homosexuality and bestiality in a film intended to resuscitate a tortured artist, displaying his agony and his genius.

As Linklater did with Jack Black BernieHe launches a right American film star to play a gay anti-hero, and the result is a less subtle caricature than anything that clings to the walls of Sardi. Even before Larry started drinking, Hawke embarks on a buffoon rebound. Its performance is to play cheap seats, with vaulted eyebrows and an infinite attitude that wink which is better suited to Hollywood Squares. The more ridiculous is the lengths to which Linklater crosses that Hart was short, 5 feet high at most.

The set of Sardi is built so that Cannavale is absolutely touched on Hawke, which, 5 feet 10 inches high, is itself overshadowed by the furniture around it. Sitting at the bar, he stood to reach the edge for a stroke. Large plans become even more stupid, reminding how much Peter Jackson went to cook hobbits crediblely next to Gandalf. Perhaps this visual effect was supposed to reflect the way in which Hart’s physical stature could have led his feeling before the others he admired. But it looks ridiculous.

Margaret Qualley gives off the elegance of the old school Blue moon.

Fortunately, after a painful section of Larry going to an almost empty bar, other characters present themselves who refuse to be “extras” – as Snidely of the bartender writes. Among them, Margaret Qualley, playing an art student from Yale named Elizabeth Weiland, who is as free of mind as she is glamorous. It is the protégé of Larry and the current fixation. Before her arrival, he takes place on her beauty and her shine as if she had not only suspended the moon, but created it whole. But that also feeds a tedious trope, in which an idolatrous gay a magnificent and daring woman in a way that is objective, even if it is not sexual.

Despite her noisy and serious enthusiasm for Elizabeth, nobody – not even her – believes him. Instead, it seems that he envies him when he plans Richard – like someone beautiful and talent who is easy to love.

Blue moon is so imbued with Larry’s disgust that he denounces his title song, even though others praise him. He lies, sneaks and flies to even reach the slightest worship of others, whether they are a flower of flowers or the idolating Elizabeth. And in this despair, the performance of Hawke could evoke the dated identity of Harvey Proudestein by Jon Lovitz, with the howling slogan, “I just want to be loved, Is it so false!? “”

At Qualley Credit, she marries the role of this dream girl, bringing a deeper inner life to Elizabeth through a monologue causing teeth on a sexual feat that has shot comically. In this scene, at least, Linklater and Kaplow make Elizabeth more than an ideal for their needy hero to be faced. While she enters Sardi, with her comes a different tone, a more anchored performance style that makes Hawke’s exaggerated capting all the more discordant.

Andrew Scott is the best part of Blue moon.

Finally, finally, the Oklahoma! Contingent arrives, and with their glitter and their excitement, they sweep the Maudlin clouds of the monologue of Larry. Sardi loss. Rodgers (Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) are New York’s toast! And Larry tries and fails to be a good sport.

Of course, when he arrived at the bar, he spitted bile on the way this Broadway musical is, but now he is all praised. However, from the moment Blue moon.

Richard is polite but kept while Larry begins to chat it, speaking of the way they should make a show together on comic cannibals. While Larry is essentially jostling for his means of subsistence and well -intentioned, the sleeves of joy are arguing to praise Richard. For them, Larry is practically invisible.

Scott changes the concentration of the drowning man with smiling fans several times with a striking eloquence which suggests that Richard did this dance with Larry several times before. Even now, as their partnership seems to its end, it protected it from embarrassment, protection and pain by necessity.

While the after-game is dragging, Larry grows more and more Richard, causing him in a confrontation on whom they were together as a creative partnership, how far they came and what could be the next one. But where Larry is lost in the past, Richard sees a future that goes beyond him. In the midst of the frustration and the patience that Scott brings in these painful needles of the heart, which become more in disorder with each reconnection, it also brings sorrow. As he drinks publicly to death, Larry could joke that everyone acts as if they praised prematurely. But Scott plays Richard as if he could see that it is not so premature, because the only person who could stop this descending spiral made whiskey blows overnight.

Scenes where the loves of Larry – whether platonic or romantic – challenge it when Blue moon works. The capring of this clown collided with painful and elegant characters who do not buy his act, and in this link of Linklater to the deep. Everything Larry wants is to be seen and loved, not as he is but as he wishes. He passes enormous and exhausting energy trying to convince beautiful young men, magnificent young women and his friend closest to this facade, and it is perhaps his greatest defect. There is a soft-amer and a beautiful tragedy, but with all the buffoonery, Blue moon Will not let this heartbreaking thread shine.

Blue moon was examined from the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. It opens in limited release on October 17, before moving largely on October 24.