Blue Moon

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Eric H-G posted this review on Facebook — and, not previously having been aware of this movie, I'm really intrigued:

Hollywood Reporter:  Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley Mesmerize in Richard
                                                   Linklater's Affecting Study of a Gifted Artist on a Downhill Slide
                                                   Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott co-star in this real-time account of musical-theater lyricist Lorenz Hart
                                                   getting pickled at Sardi's on opening night of his former writing partner's Broadway triumph Oklahoma!


It reminds me a bit of Raising Havoc — the tone may be quite different, but the inside-baseball view of midcentury Broadway has me itching to see Blue Moon.  Well, that and the gold-plated cast, and David Rooney's glowing review; and, sure, also the counterfactual inclusion of a 13-year-old "Stevie" Sondheim at the opening night that would catapult his soon-to-be mentor's already remarkable career into the ionosphere.

While Hammerstein apparently did take the young Sondheim to see Oklahoma! at some point in 1943, SJS recalled his first-ever opening night as that of Carousel's 1945 Hartford tryout, on his fifteenth birthday, where the Act I finale so moved him that he stained Dorothy Hammersteins's fur with his tears.  But reflexive disdain for the film's inaccuracy on this point, as evinced by some Facebookers in reaction to the review, strikes me as too inside-baseball, by far — dismissing a valid and potentially fascinating dramatic choice on the basis of what can only be regarded, outside the realms of documentary or nonfiction biography (or of hypersensitive fandom), as historical trivia.  Even from Rooney's review alone it seems likely to me that, beyond just wanting to namecheck Sondheim, Linklater may understandably have found the dramatic usefulness of repositioning him on that particular block of Manhattan on that particular evening, at the scene of Hart's Waterloo, too intriguing to resist.  We're watching Hart on this fateful night, in real time, as he slips irrevocably into Broadway's obsolete past.  But what would it be like to put him into even brief, awkward conversation with its unwitting future, the next Next Big Thing who will in turn grow up to supersede — and, in quasi-Oedipal terms, vanquish — the revolutionary duo whose epochal joint success is displacing and effectively destroying Hart before our eyes?  Also: how does it shade this imagined conversation if we know that Hart and Sondheim, urbane gay men of the Lost and Silent Generations, respectively, whose lyrics reflect a discernibly similar sensibility — an often sharp, sometimes aching existential ambivalence about love and loneliness — will each be held in historical contrast to the straight, married-with-children R&H's optimistic, heteronormative midcentury "innocence"?  This doesn't look to me like random sloppiness on Linklater's part, and still less like arrogance.  It just looks like good storytelling.

Apparently a US release is planned for this May.  [Ed.: Pushed to October, see below].

In 2008 I designed a Rodgers & Hart revue which lightly sketched both men's biographies over its 90ish-minute runtime, in the process making them each a bit more vivid to me than they had previously been — especially Hart, and especially in his decline.  So I'm fascinated to see what Linklater (an established Sond-head in good standing) and Hawke (one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, according to a friend of mine who was once a downtown neighbor of his) make of him.

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Deadline:   Richard Linklater's Blue Moon To Rise This Fall


Limited theatrical release October 17, going wider October 24.