The Saddest Song in the Room

Read Time:5 Minute, 29 Second

MOVIE REVIEWS
Blue Moon [Blu-ray]
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Genre: Drama, Biography
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Richard Linklater
Writer(s): Robert Kaplow
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale
Where to Watch: available now, order your copy here: www.moviezyng.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: Some artists fade quietly into the ether. Others self-destruct in the public eye. BLUE MOON traps you inside one night when both happen at the same time. Richard Linklater builds the film almost entirely inside Sardi’s (the iconic New York restaurant) on March 31, 1943, as Lorenz Hart waits for the opening night curtain call of OKLAHOMA! His former collaborator, Richard Rodgers, is upstairs making history with Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart is downstairs nursing a glass of bourbon and wrestling with the knowledge that he’s been replaced. That’s the whole movie. And that’s exactly why it works.

Linklater has always trusted conversation over pageantry. Here, he doubles down. BLUE MOON is less a traditional biopic and more a contained character study. It’s a movie at a bar. A slow bleed of insecurity disguised as wit. The camera doesn’t recall flashbacks or overproduce the Broadway myth. It sits with Hart. It listens to him unravel.

Ethan Hawke gives one of his sharpest performances in years. He doesn’t play Hart as the tragic genius. He plays him as brittle, funny, petty, charming, and exhausted. There’s ego in him, but it’s laced with self-awareness. You can feel the humiliation beneath every line. The more he talks about art, success, taste, and Oklahoma!’s “cornpone” sentimentality, the clearer it becomes that he already knows the show is going to redefine the American musical.

The casting could’ve almost felt gimmicky (to be fair, beforehand, I thought it was). Hawke and Linklater reuniting again for another talk-heavy chamber piece could have easily played out as indulgent. It doesn’t, though. Hawke disappears into Hart’s being. The comb-over, the posture, the stature recreated through blocking and camera placement, none of it feels like parody. It feels true to the story.

Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers with restraint. He doesn’t villainize him. He doesn’t sanctify him either. Rodgers understands Hart’s talent. He also understands Hart’s volatility. There’s affection there, but there’s finality too. You sense the professional breakup long before anyone says it outright.

Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth Weiland becomes the emotional counterweight. She’s the object of Hart’s fixation, his romantic ideal, his delusion. Their dynamic is uncomfortable by design. Hart is twice her age, openly struggling with his sexuality, and emotionally unstable. Yet he clings to her presence as proof he’s still relevant, still desirable, still seen. Qualley plays the part with composure. She doesn’t overstate it. She lets the power imbalance and emotional complexity sit in the air.

Structurally, BLUE MOON feels theatrical. It almost unfolds like a stage play. Characters enter. Conversations overlap. Monologues stretch out. For some viewers, that’ll feel static. There are no sweeping montages. No musical fantasy interludes. No dramatic breakdown in Times Square. If you’re expecting a rousing Broadway backstage epic, you’ll be restless. This is, and was meant to be, a study of a story seen through a man struggling with so much at once. This stillness is all intentional. Hart is stuck. His career is stalled. His partnership is over. The American musical is moving ahead without him. The film mirrors that inertia. It keeps him at the barstool. It lets the alcohol do the pacing.

Where it succeeds most is in its refusal to flatten Hart into a cautionary tale. Yes, alcoholism is at the focus. His self-sabotage is evident. But the film doesn’t reduce him to addiction. It’s about obsolescence. About watching your art form evolve past you. About knowing you helped build something, only to be written out of its future.

Linklater also avoids melodrama. There’s no reconciliation. No redemption arc. Instead, the film lingers on conversations about art, authorship, collaboration, and ownership. It interrogates how easily history reshapes creative partnerships into a cleaned-up narrative. Rodgers and Hammerstein became legends. Rodgers and Hart become a footnote.

The production design does a lot of the subtle heavy lifting. The period detail never overwhelms the performances. The lighting in Sardi’s feels smoky and intimate without romanticizing it. The score and musical references are woven carefully. BLUE MOON isn’t trying to sell nostalgia. It’s trying to sell emotional dislocation.

If you’re not already invested in musical theater, some of the context may feel niche. And at times, the script leans heavily on Hart’s brilliance, risking fatigue. He talks a lot. That’s the point, but it tests patience. What lingers is the ache. The awareness that genius doesn’t protect you from being replaced. That timing matters as much as talent. That collaboration can be both salvation and erasure.

BLUE MOON sits in a corner booth and lets a man talk himself into clarity. And in that contained space, it finds something quietly devastating.

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