Mon, Mar 16 at 8:00pm: Introduction from Bill DeMain, a musician, songwriter and music journalist who has written extensively for MOJO and Classic Rock. In the early ‘90s, DeMain did a series of interviews with Great American Songbook composers and lyricists like Burton Lane, Paul Weston and Mitchell Parish, who were contemporaries of Lorenz Hart | BUY TICKETS
Part of Music City Mondays
In BLUE MOON, director Richard Linklater (HIT MAN, TIFF ’23, and at this year’s Festival with NOUVELLE VAGUE) crafts a riveting chamber piece set in real time at Sardi’s on the historic night in 1943 of Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) greatest triumph: the premiere of Oklahoma! Ethan Hawke delivers a charming, lived-in performance as Rodgers’ former collaborator, lyricist Lorenz Hart, an alcoholic and marginally closeted raconteur grappling with the fact that Rodgers’ biggest success now belongs to a new partnership with Oscar Hammerstein.
As flowers and accolades pour into the restaurant, heralding a new era of American musicals, Hart holds court at the bar, regaling a plainspoken bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and a young, aspiring composer and military officer with stories. His current fixation is a 20-year-old Yale student, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he reveres with a fervor that drifts between romantic longing and aesthetic worship.
Among the guests is essayist E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), perched in a corner, making his presence known to offer le mot juste — “ineffable” — during one of Hart’s rhapsodic monologues about Elizabeth. The film imagines White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, drawing creative inspiration from Hart as he contemplates a shift into children’s literature.
Hart and Rodgers affectionately spar throughout the night, working through the regrets in their partnership and promising to start anew. Ultimately, through Hart’s reflections on love, art and legacy, the film becomes a bittersweet elegy for his overshadowed place in musical history — a graceful tribute to the man behind PAL JOEY, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE, “My Funny Valentine” and the titular “Blue Moon.”
“The film is like a fountain of champagne for theater aficionados.” —Kyle Smith, Wall Street Journal “Hawke is magnificent to behold…. a film that proves deeply captivating the further it gets into its runtime. Even at a mere 100 minutes, it feels like an entire lifetime lived and explored, all through the lens of regret, artistic disappointment, and the ways in which they trickle down into even the smallest of interactions and the most fleeting glances.” —Siddhant Adlakha, IGN “A romantic, funny, moving, life-affirming chamber piece that is itself a great example of a three-way creative collaboration — between director Richard Linklater, writer Robert Kaplow and actor Ethan Hawke…. An intimate character study, BLUE MOON is warmly shot, soaked in nostalgia for a lost theatrical world.” —Lee Marshall, Screen Daily
