Blue Moon (2025) Movie Review: Ethan Hawke delivers Oscar-Worthy Performance

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon unfolds like a bar-room ghost story: one broken man, one long night, and a parade of Broadway legends who only half-remember his name. Set almost entirely inside Manhattan’s famed Sardi’s restaurant on the 1943 opening night of Oklahoma! the film traps lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart—played by a never-better Ethan Hawke—in a booze-soaked purgatory while his lifelong creative partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) celebrates the dawn of a new era without him.

What should feel claustrophobic becomes compulsively watchable, thanks to Hawke’s volcanic, tour-de-force turn that swings from razor-sharp zingers to raw, hiccupping sobs without warning.

It’s the kind of performance that wins Oscars and rewrites careers; unfortunately, it’s also the only element that keeps Linklater’s uncertain experiment from collapsing under its own contradictions.

A single-location character piece is nothing new for the director who gave us the 12-year canvas of Boyhood and the walking-and-talking Before trilogy. Here, however, the minimalist approach exposes the script’s fault lines instead of smoothing them. Screenwriter Robert Kaplow frames the night as a freewheeling memory play: Hart holds court with a colorful bartender (Bobby Cannavale, terrific), trades barbs with a gently disapproving E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), and nurses a flirtation with a star-struck Yale student (Margaret Qualley) who may or may not have existed. These encounters are meant to illuminate the lyricist’s professional decline and sexual fluidity, yet each new composite character or compressed timeline reminder pulls us out of the moment, forcing us to fact-check when we should be feeling.

The historical liberties start small—an anachronistic Sondheim cameo here, a fabricated Rodgers-and-Hart reunion pitch there—then snowball into tonal whiplash. One second Hart is savaging Oscar Hammerstein’s “corn-fed” rhymes for Oklahoma; the next he’s dropping encyclopedic details about his own 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee, as though the screenplay can’t decide whether to humanize the man or turn him into a Broadway Wikipedia page. Linklater’s camera, meanwhile, seems obsessed with Hart’s real-life 4’10” stature, ducking and weaving to keep Hawke’s eye-line below every other actor’s chin. The gambit is meant to evoke the character’s small-man insecurity, but after an hour of odd-angle close-ups it becomes a distracting parlor trick that muffles the actor’s enormous emotional range.

That range is staggering. Hawke, sporting a rumpled tux and eyes that flicker between charm and panic, delivers arias of self-loathing that feel both theatrical and painfully intimate. Watch the way he lingers on the phrase “my funny valentine” when he hears a lounge pianist noodle the standard—half pride, half eulogy—or how his voice cracks on the punchline of a joke no one asked him to tell. It’s a masterclass in controlled chaos, the kind of performance that will be clipped in acting classes for years to come. Scott’s cool, patrician Rodgers provides the perfect foil, all polished gratitude where Hart is frayed desperation; their final handshake lands like a tombstone slamming shut.

Yet for all its emotional fireworks, Blue Moon can’t escape the feeling that we’re watching a filmed play—sometimes even a radio play. The single setting, long speeches, and on-the-nose symbolism (Hart orders “one for the road” at least three times) beg for the immediacy of live theater. Linklater sprinkles in ghostly flashbacks and fantasy musical numbers, but they arrive too late and exit too early to open up the visuals. By the time end credits roll, you may wonder whether this story needed the cinema at all, or whether its heart beats louder on a dimly lit stage.

Still, there is value in the discomfort. At its best, the movie plays like a cautionary ballad about artistic obsolescence—how quickly the culture moves on when you stop delivering the goods. Hart’s alcoholism, his closeted bisexuality, his perfectionist disdain for Hammerstein’s populist sincerity: all are strands of the same noose tightening around a man who helped invent the American musical but can’t reinvent himself. If Linklater’s execution wobbles between truth and legend, Hawke finds the bruised soul in the gap. His Hart is both villain and victim, genius and footnote, a dazzling contradiction who earns our pity without asking for forgiveness.

So, is Blue Moon worth the ticket price?

Absolutely, for anyone who cares about acting at its most fearless. Just don’t expect a comprehensive biography, a tight narrative, or even a particularly cinematic evening. Expect a barstool eulogy delivered by a poet who knows the rhyme for “moon” is “June”—and who also knows that both words now sound like tiny monuments to a world that’s already moved on.