Blue Moon

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

[mr_rating_result]

Lorenz Hart (May 2, 1895 – November 22, 1943) was half of the groundbreaking songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart, responsible for some 500 Broadway songs. The tune “My Funny Valentine” contains the very essence of erotic love, its haunt, its joy, and its jeopardy. A new film by Richard Linklater (Nouvelle Vague) brings the tortured aspect of this brilliant writer to life. 

This lively yet melancholic film is staccato in its delivery with great dialogue and plenty of pathos. With electric intensity but also a somber rhythm, Linklater describes Hart’s demon in a bottle to perfection.

Larry Hart (Ethan Hawke) is vexed with envy. His former partner and dear friend Richard Rodgers is having a celebratory party for his first hit show without him: the musical Oklahoma! Hart does not feel ambitious or worthy; he is plagued by self-doubt and a lack of confidence in small part perhaps, due to his appearance.

Hart knows he should not reach for the multiple shots of bourbon but yet he is helpless. To divert his mind away from romantic feelings for his friend Richard Rogers, and ultimately lift his spirits to what he feels to be a more positive direction, he becomes obsessed by a charismatic young thespian Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) who cares for him but only sees him as platonic.

When Larry sees his love interest Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) he latches on, in turns self-deprecating, charming, then bitter and resentful, pitching a concept of the sardonic life of Marco Polo. Dick winces uncomfortably and he is whisked away to the It Crowd of Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney).

Larry spins a grandiose recollection of himself and Elizabeth spending a passionate weekend together full of secrets and seduction, darkness, and desire. To him, Elizabeth is a Hart love song with legs and wild hair. It is the long hair; he tells the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) that he first noticed.

The reclusive and distant E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) has the perfect words to describe the mystery of love but does not know what to say regarding the staying power of relationships, tortured or otherwise.

Larry insists to the bar-mates that he has found his sensual Muse and everyone in proximity merely humor him.

Armed with the elixir of alcohol, Larry soars to the heights of Oscar Wilde blended with Charles Bukowski and a pinch of Hugh Hefner. But without it, he is a diminutive gnome, reticent and forlorn, an upside-down hat in hand, his wrinkled suit, a woolly record of past smiles.

Near the end, kneeling down to Elizabeth, Hart is both an infant and a hopeful baseball catcher, waiting to receive something of intrigue, a literary home run or an amorous bon mot.

When Hart’s face drops, blindsided by Elizabeth’s cutting words of familial affection, his expression is of the moon without its brightness, lugubrious and full of rain. A creator crushed.

This is one of the most vivid and affecting of Hawke’s performances and his face possesses all of the vocabulary required. Within Hawke’s pores exist the leaps of hope and the blasting downs of sorrow, failure, and unavoidable despair.

Hart, who lived with his mother, died at a hospital at age 48 from complications of pneumonia shortly after being found in the street.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com