NZIFF: Blue Moon (1)

A washed-up songwriter drowns his sorrows as his former collaborator triumphantly opens Oklahoma! on Broadway. A career-peak performance by Ethan Hawke powers Richard Linklater’s theatrical drama.

The best thing Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) ever wrote was the song ‘Blue Moon’, a timeless standard covered by the likes of Elvis, Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald — and he hates it. Like many artists, he resents the tossed-off, gorgeous simplicity of his work most embraced by the public. His former composing partner of two decades, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), has moved on to work with Oscar Hammerstein. Their first work together, Oklahoma!, was the kind of breakout hit Rodgers and Hart always chased, but never quite achieved. Opening night, 1943, only months before his untimely death at the hands of pneumonia (and alcoholism), and Hart is losing himself in a bottle at famed Broadway hotspot Sardi’s, waiting for the newly minted megahit pair to make their entrance to the afterparty. Short, balding, and often exasperatingly verbose, Hart wins admirers easily, but keeps few friends, and is romantically obsessed with his ‘protégé’, a Yale student named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) with whom the quite probably queer Hart has an exceedingly complicated, all-consuming relationship.

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