"Blue Moon" is a great play but it isn't on the stage; it's on the screen, an original screenplay by Robert Kaplow, (inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland), but basically staged on one set, Sardi's, on the opening night of 'Oklahoma', the first musical Richard Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein after ditching his song-writing partner of more than 20 years, Lorenz Hart and it's Hart, not Rodgers and certainly not Hammerstein, who's the main attraction.
This is the story of a brilliant but bitter alcoholic, a homosexual who probably wanted to be heterosexual and who perhaps convinced himself, if no-one else, that he was heterosexual and he's played magnificently by Ethan Hawke, (digitally reduced in height), in a performance that, had it been in the theatre, would have become the stuff of legend and which might still do here on film.
Everyone else are just supporting characters in Hart's world but at least they are memorably played by Bobby Cannavale, (Sardi's lone barman), Andrew Scott, (Rodgers), Patrick Kennedy, (the writer E.B. White), and best of all Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth, the girl Hart worships as the very epitome of beauty,
It's a sad but ultimately uplifting movie, (how could any movie featuring the music of Rodgers and Hart be anything but uplifting), and it shows once again the command director Richard Linklater has over almost any material be brings to the screen. Yes, this might make a great play but Linklater keeps it highly cinematic, using every inch of the Sardi's setting beautifully. Moving and not in the least sentimental.
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