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.
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Displaced by Oscar Hammerstein II as Richard Rodgers’s work husband, Hart has just bitterly ditched the Broadway premiere of the new dream team’s debut production, Oklahoma! Derided by Hart as a hokey caricature of rural America, that “cornpone” cash cow looms over the film as much as the illustrious grotesques at Sardi’s: wartime America and Broadway legendizing themselves side by side, in equally broad strokes.
Larry’s bitchy Irish exit from Oklahoma! means he’s also the first fan awaiting Rodgers at the opening party at Sardi’s, where nearly all of Linklater’s movie takes place. Once Hart’s teenage protégé, composer Rodgers (Andrew Scott, spinning pragmatism into magnetism) has now, at the unceremonious conclusion of twenty-five years of collaboration, eclipsed his crapulent colleague. Hart’s only path back to life is through him. On this fateful night, in deflecting the Broadway barfly’s last-ditch proposition to reteam for a new musical, Rodgers effectively signs Hart’s DNR.
Hawke physically transforms, but traces of his puppyish vigor peek out beneath Hart’s hollowed face and dumpy comb-over. As Broadway’s loser, he’s quite winning. Channeled by the thinking man’s leading man, Hart’s foibles, vices, and gluttony for punishment feel painfully relatable. Rodgers isn’t the only one he’s desperate to woo. Culturally gay and sexually fluid, he has chosen to orchestrate his evening, to anyone who’ll listen, around the pursuit of slinky Ivy Leaguer Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). Around her, Larry acts like a pervy GBF: orbiting, affirming, whatever’s 1940s for “yas kween”–ing—lusting all the while after his limerent object.
Sardi’s. Lauren Martin
Hart tiptoes through the party’s buffet of minor humiliations, his diminutive stature corporealizing his shrinking relevance. In this shrine where renown is fossilized in crude cartoons, his present already feels past. Compounding the nostalgia, the Sardi’s of Blue Moon is a facsimile constructed on a Dublin sound studio, the creation of a production designer who had never set foot in the still-standing actual restaurant. (Nick Jonas and Sarah Snook, among others, received their portraits in 2025.)
Often with considerable grace, Linklater makes time—whether embalmed in whiskey in Blue Moon, cruelly feather-light in Before Sunset, or steadily transformative, etching itself into famous faces in Boyhood—his medium. (He’s also shooting, over twenty years, the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, whose scenario—another creative-divorce dramedy about a composer and lyricist’s soured partnership—unfolds in retrograde.) Blue Moon could be criticized as static: Why isn’t this talky chamber piece (written by Robert Kaplow) a play? But film feels apt: Theater, “dying art form” though it’s been for over a century, is also proof of life. Film is memorial.
“I went directly from childhood to washed up,” cracks Hart at one point, his best defense a rueful wit that preempts every jab with a self-inflicted punch. Like Blue Moon’s namesake ditty, and so much of the jaunty melancholy Hart contributed to the Great American Songbook, the film instills rock bottom with just enough levity to feel like a faint pop of champagne—in the next room, at someone else’s party.