Blue Moon

Richard Linklater's Blue Moon is a 100-minute hangout movie set in one restaurant on one night, and it works because Ethan Hawke refuses to let you look away.

The setup is simple. It's March 31, 1943. Lorenz Hart, once half of the most celebrated songwriting duo in Broadway history, has slipped out of the opening night of Oklahoma!, the blockbuster musical his ex-partner Richard Rodgers wrote with a new collaborator. Hart ends up at Sardi's, where the post-show celebration is being set up. Over the course of the evening, he drinks, holds court, flirts, lies, confesses, and watches everything he built walk out the door.

Hart's sexuality sits at the center of this movie and there's no dancing around it. He calls himself "omnisexual," flirts with a flower delivery boy, and carries a torch for Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old Yale art student with whom he's had months of correspondence and one unconsummated weekend. The film treats Hart's closeted existence with empathy and without any winking modern editorializing. This is how it was. He loved who he loved, and 1943 America had no room for it. Conservative viewers who can't tolerate that subject matter should skip this one entirely. No judgment. But there it is.

Here's where things get interesting for our audience: the movie doesn't let Hart off the hook. Not even close. Hart is a drunk. A narcissist. A man who blew up his own partnership because he couldn't show up sober and on time. The film makes this crystal clear. When Rodgers (Andrew Scott, superb in a Silver Bear-winning performance) pulls Hart aside to suggest a collaboration on a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, you can see the wariness in Scott's eyes. He's offering an olive branch to a man who's set fire to every olive branch he's ever been given.

The movie doesn't blame society for all of that. Yes, being closeted in 1943 was a form of slow torture. The film acknowledges that honestly. But Hart's alcoholism, his self-pity, his inability to match Rodgers' discipline... the film lays those at his feet. He had talent that Hammerstein could only dream of, and he poured it down the drain. Seven months after this evening, he collapsed drunk in the street and died a few days later. The film ends with that fact, unadorned. No redemption arc. No last-minute sobriety. Vice has consequences. Full stop.

There's something genuinely conservative buried in Hart's lament about Oklahoma! He sees it as the death of sophistication in musical theater, the triumph of earnest Americana over wit. Whether Linklater agrees or not is beside the point. The film gives Hart's position real weight. You feel the loss of a particular tradition, a particular style, being steamrolled by the culture.

Bobby Cannavale plays Eddie, the bartender at Sardi's, and he's the film's quiet conscience. He tries not to serve Hart liquor. He listens. He and Hart bond over a shared love of Casablanca. It's a small, warm performance that grounds the film when Hawke's pyrotechnics threaten to overwhelm it.

The historical cameos are a delight. Patrick Kennedy shows up as E. B. White, and there's a lovely scene where Hart invents the name "Stuart" for a mouse that keeps visiting his apartment. White jots something in his notebook. If you know your children's literature, you smile. Young Stephen Sondheim appears as Hammerstein's protege. George Roy Hill (future director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) gets Hart's autograph. Weegee lurks around with his camera. The film creates a tapestry of mid-century American culture that treats its legacy with genuine reverence.

Is this a woke movie? It depends on how strict your definition is. The progressive elements are real: Hart's queerness is presented sympathetically, his closeted suffering is framed as unjust, and the film's emotional architecture demands you feel for a gay man who couldn't live openly. But the traditional elements are just as real: personal responsibility for one's choices, consequences of vice and addiction, reverence for artistic craft and cultural heritage, and a character study that holds its subject accountable rather than canonizing him. These two currents run side by side and the film never resolves the tension between them. That's actually what makes it good.

You will not feel lectured. That alone sets Blue Moon apart from most prestige cinema in 2025.

Trope	Category	Location	Authenticity
Normalization of Non-Traditional Sexuality	WOKE	Throughout -- Hart's homosexuality and bisexuality form the emotional core	Organic
The Sympathetic Outsider	WOKE	Throughout -- Hart framed as brilliant outsider on every axis	Organic
Institutional Evil (Implied)	WOKE	Background throughout -- mid-century America's treatment of gay men	Organic
Consequences of Vice	TRADITIONAL	Throughout and closing text -- Hart's alcoholism destroys everything	Organic
Personal Accountability	TRADITIONAL	Throughout -- Hart held responsible for sabotaging his own talent	Organic
Industry and Perseverance / Artistic Discipline	TRADITIONAL	Hart's lament about Oklahoma!; the Hart-Rodgers dynamic	Organic
Wise Elder / Respect for Legacy	TRADITIONAL	Throughout -- historical cameos and reverence for Broadway's golden age	Organic