Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is the kind of film that knows exactly who it’s for, and makes no attempt to dilute itself for anyone else. Set almost entirely over one night inside Sardi’s restaurant on the opening of Oklahoma! in 1943, the film unfolds less like a traditional biopic and more like a rueful, jazz-inflected chamber piece: talky, intimate, deeply literary, and quietly devastating. It’s classic Linklater territory – time suspended, conversation as action, character revealed not through plot mechanics but through rhythm, contradiction, and emotional drift.
This is not a film interested in the grand sweep of Broadway history. Instead, Blue Moon zeroes in on the ache of artistic displacement, watching Lorenz Hart, half of one of the great American songwriting duos, reckon with being left behind as his former partner Richard Rodgers ushers in a new era with Hammerstein. The dialogue-heavy structure may feel austere to some, but for those attuned to Linklater’s wavelength, the film becomes hypnotic. Words pile on words, jokes deflect pain, and intellectual bravado masks a man unraveling in real time.
At the centre of it all is Ethan Hawke, delivering one of the most extraordinary performances of his career, and arguably of the last year. Hawke doesn’t simply play Hart; he disappears into him. There is no showboating here, no obvious “Oscar clip” theatrics. Instead, the performance is built from quiet humiliations, brittle wit, physical diminishment, and a kind of spiritual exhaustion that seeps into every gesture. Hawke makes Hart brilliant, irritating, seductive, self-sabotaging, and unbearably lonely. Sometimes all within the same sentence. It’s the kind of performance that doesn’t demand attention but lingers long after the screen goes dark, and in an honest awards landscape, it should absolutely earn him an Academy Award nomination, and, frankly, the win.
The supporting cast is equally as uniformly strong, with Andrew Scott offering a coolly contained, subtly cutting Richard Rodgers, a man who understands Hart perhaps too well. Bobby Cannavale brings warmth and grounded humanity as Eddie the bartender, while Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland not as a manic pixie fantasy but as a young woman whose kindness and confusion inadvertently sharpen Hart’s despair. Their scenes together are among the film’s most quietly cruel, not because of malice, but because of emotional asymmetry.
Visually restrained and modest in scale, Blue Moon resists the temptation to romanticise its subject or its era. Shane F. Kelly’s cinematography keeps us close, almost uncomfortably so, while Graham Reynolds’ score hums gently in the background, never insisting on emotion but allowing it to surface naturally. This is not a flashy film, nor does it aspire to be. Its pleasures are intellectual, emotional, and deeply human.
Yes, Blue Moon is niche. It’s a film about a very specific moment, a very specific man, and a very particular kind of cultural grief. But within those narrow confines, it achieves something quietly profound. It captures the terror of obsolescence, the cruelty of unreciprocated love, and the loneliness that can accompany genius, especially when the world has already moved on. For those willing to lean into its rhythms, Blue Moon is richly rewarding. And for Hawke, it stands as a career-defining reminder of what happens when an actor fully surrenders to a role – not to impress, but to tell the truth.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Blue Moon is screening in Australian theatres from January 29th, 2026.
