Opening night: "Blue Moon"

Blue Moon is Richard Linklater the theatre kid, adding another to the strand in this ever more impressive filmography that gave us 1996's SubUrbia, 2001's Tape and 2008's Me and Orson Welles (and arguably even 2003's School of Rock). But it's also still recognisably Richard Linklater the romantic, if we recognise Blue Moon as its own kind of break-up movie. Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, as all good theatre kids know, there was Rodgers and Hart, the composer-lyricist pairing who gave us "My Funny Valentine", "The Lady is a Tramp" and the title track among other standards. Golden boy Richard Rodgers was a man on the up, becoming the toast of mid-20th century Broadway; by contrast, Lorenz Hart - a diminutive, prematurely balding alcoholic - was, after his early success, a man on the skids. Linklater's biopic of the latter, written by Robert Kaplow, actually opens with its 48-year-old subject (played by Ethan Hawke, stooped beneath a greasy combover) collapsing and all but perishing of pneumonia by the bins in a New York back alley, his body left out in the rain like last week's trash. Cue a scene change: we flash back seven months to witness Hart, held upright by the piss and vinegar in his blood, ducking out of the premiere of Rodgers' new smash Oklahoma! to hold court in a bar across the way, where he sits, drinks, snipes and has to watch the raves and garlands coming in for his former collaborator. This Hart is cultured, witty, gossipy and garrulous - translation: you can't shut the guy up - but he can also be hard work, a narcissistic nightmare. (Any resemblance to other showbusiness figures, etc. etc.) We understand why the movie's Rodgers (an upright Andrew Scott) may have thought it best to move beyond Hart's glibly adolescent provocations; we just feel sorry for the barman (Bobby Cannavale) who has to listen to his embittered tirades, and for the 20-year-old co-ed the middle-aged lyricist has misguidedly set his heart on. (As played by Margaret Qualley, she's called Elizabeth, but may as well go by the name Hail Mary.) With all his erstwhile triumphs turning to apparent failure, Hart is yesterday's man, a fact apparent even before his early toast to the way it was: "To the great and glorious past, when it all mattered so much."

As we watch Hart tying up his earthly business - or resigning himself to his fate - another Linklater hoves into view: the adaptable independent contractor. The director has sympathy for Hart, who's a great character at the very least, someone one might well construct a diverting movie around. But Linklater has also long metabolised the life lessons that a figure such as Hart represents: the need to move on and evolve, to let the past go, to live in the present with an eye to the future; to resist succumbing to both the masochism that is the writer's fate and the bitterness and jealousy the creative industries inevitably foster. (Flexibility is, was and shall forever remain the key.) His latest project is so steeped in theatreland you could easily imagine it being reworked for the stage, but it's good theatre: atmospheric, crafty, textured, literate, characterful, as suffused in lived experience as any barman's rag, 100 minutes that give you the world. Kaplow has apparently proceeded from an intriguing prompt: what if you made theatre itself the basis of a play like The Iceman Cometh? Well, for starters, it provides an abundant opportunity for your actors. Hawke, for one, has never in his four-decade screen career been more front-and-centre, nor asked to be more relentless. The casual talk required of him in Linklater's Before films is here replaced by something more forced, loaded and desperate: the last words of a sometime leading light reduced to the status of a supporting player, only just more notable than the so-called "extras" the bar now surrounds him with. This Hart is himself giving a performance, pretending to go entirely unaffected by the sight of his former partner arm-in-arm with another man. If you're struggling to conceive of Blue Moon as another of Linklater's relationship movies, listen to Rodgers telling Hart "I want to be one of those composers who writes with other lyricists", and clock the front the latter immediately has to put on. What Linklater has spotted, in his many years on the job, is that showbiz folks are uniquely well-engineered to switch on and off, to put on a show as required - but that doesn't mean they don't hurt like the rest of us.

For much of Blue Moon, Hart is so busy trying to make himself a memorable character that he forgets he's also a human being - but Hawke never does, instead finding the vulnerabilities beneath the lyricist's flinty and brittle surface: the regrets, the looming fear of old age and irrelevancy, of becoming an afterthought in a far more illustrious story. (There may be nothing more indie in all 2025 cinema than the sympathy Hawke and Linklater demonstrate for this footnote - but then the guy wrote "Blue Moon", you know?) Still, it's not all Hart. Although conceived along smaller, tighter lines than Dazed and Confused and School of Rock, this is also another of Linklater's ensemble pieces, attentive indeed to those who draw different notes and responses - from bawdy camaraderie to mortal offence - out of the main character; collectively, they come to suggest the demimonde and wider world that have left Lorenz Hart behind. Scott's solid-pro Rodgers senses the way the wind is blowing as WW2 drags on, and spends much of this particular night trying not to lose it at the wretch clinging to his coattails; there's also a nicely self-effacing turn from Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White, more comfortable in midlife than Hart, and more open to the world, too. (A fun in-joke about a certain mouse is one of Kaplow's riffs on the ways creatives borrow from one another, how they can take a stray thought or idea and make it their own.) For me, what finally elevated Blue Moon into the front rank of American filmmaking in 2025 is that Linklater is the first director to properly explain Margaret Qualley to me, rather than merely forcing her into my eyes and down my throat as if she were AI. (If I were Sydney Sweeney's people, I'd be DMing Linklater 24/7.) Linklater dresses Qualley up in gorgeous Consolata Boyle finery, then steps back, lets her breathe and think for herself, and regards her, fondly, as three-dimensional flesh-and-blood, an actress playing a young woman with ambitions of her own to which a less generous artist like Lorenz Hart has sadly blinded himself. There are always the consolations of art: Kaplow's screenplay, easily the year's richest, admits as much by wrapping up with a satisfying nod in the direction of Casablanca. (No harm whatsoever in borrowing from the best.) But things change, the world turns, and time really does go by.

Blue Moon is now showing in selected cinemas.