Lorenz “Larry” Hart hovers at the nexus of life and death in the Broadway bardo-and-grill Sardi’s. Along the walls of this storied den of celebrity and cannelloni, icons of a perennially obsolescing art form are memorialized alive on a wall of caricatures. Perhaps more than any other eminence displayed on the Big Apple’s most flamboyant of friezes—where each portrait threatens to break into song, Big Mouth Billy Bass–style—the protagonist of Richard Linklater’s cringe tragedy Blue Moon embodies the overripe poetry of this place and the outsized figures that pass through it, pass through fame, and pass away.
The “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon” lyricist, played by Ethan Hawke with a Gollumy makeunder, is a vestigially fabulous persona non grata of the Great White Way. A lapsed master reduced to a pest smarming around Sardi’s in 1943, Larry lives, but only in the narrow space between his professional expiration and his bibulous demise only months later.
“wage war on nostalgia and bourgeois taste”
