‘Blue Moon’ Review: Richard Linklater’s Broadway Chamber Piece Looks Back To A Lost Time And Mourns A Lost Soul – Berlin Film Festival
deadline.comFew filmmakers have as varied a CV as Richard Linklater’s. From the box office hit School of Rock to his experiments with rotoscope, he is indefatigably curious and surprisingly consistent — with style and substance.
This time around, he is testing himself with a chamber piece: a drama set almost entirely in one room and focused on a single character.
The setting is the upscale New York bar Sardi’s on the night in 1943 when Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is having its triumphant premiere; the character is American lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, there was Rodgers and Hart. They’d met when Rodgers was still in high school, going on to write a slew of hit musicals including such well-known songs as “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t it Romantic” and the enduring “Blue Moon.” Ethan Hawke, Linklater’s friend and frequent collaborator, somehow manages to shrink himself to fit the agitated, alcoholic, short and desperate Hart, now 47, discarded by his former creative partner and knowingly washed up.
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