Legendary lyricist is all Hart in Blue Moon
Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater team up again for Blue Moon in which Hawke stars as legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater have now made nine movies together with their latest, Blue Moon, rewarding Hawke with several best actor nods, including at this year’s upcoming Oscars.
Over the years I have covered their films, including the award-winning Boyhood (2014) and the so-called Before romantic trilogy – Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013).
I was lucky enough to visit the Vienna set of Before Sunrise where the pair were incredibly amenable, as was Julie Delpy, who co-starred in the trilogy and who, like Hawke, has gone on to make her own films.
Hawke, 55, and Linklater, 65, both have an enormous passion for their work and love working together.
“It’s been a 30-year conversation,” Hawke says. “It’s like I met Rick and we started talking, and 30 years have gone by and we just keep talking. It’s been natural for us. But it’s important not to take each other for granted and to have the same passions and interests that we would have if we’d just met.”
Set entirely at Sardi’s Broadway restaurant in New York, on the opening night of Oklahoma! in March 1943, Blue Moon focuses on lyricist Lorenz Hart (Hawke) who for 25 years had enjoyed a songwriting partnership with Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) in creating 28 Broadway musicals as well as hit songs such as Blue Moon.
But this partnership has come to an end as Rodgers is now composing with Oscar Hammerstein II and their first show, Oklahoma!, would become a breakthrough hit, ushering in a new kind of Broadway musical. Hart is now an alcoholic and is reflecting on his life, at times drowning his sorrows while talking to barman Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), unravelling as he tells Rodgers he is pandering to the new music.
Scott won best supporting performance as Rodgers at the Berlin Film Festival, where the film premiered.
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We also see Hart’s fascination with Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a young Yale student whose letters inspired Robert Kaplow’s Blue Moon screenplay. (Kaplow is among Oscar nominees for best original screenplay.) Hart would die a few months later and, in many ways, the film is a tribute to him.
The Ireland-shot Blue Moon marks Hawke’s and Linklater’s first collaboration since Boyhood, yet Hawke had been discussing the film with Linklater over many years.
“I was 40 when Rick first gave me this script and I wanted to do it right away,” Hawke recalls. “But he was like, ‘You’re not ready yet. You’ve got to suffer a little more. I need a few more lines on that face, and I don’t want them to be fake’.”
‘Rick wanted the movie to feel like a 90-minute Rodgers and Hart song, to break your heart, be really funny and be enchanting’
Hart, who was gay (though in the closet), Jewish and balding, was also very short (1.5m or 5 feet). So, Linklater employed “some old-fashioned stagecraft” to make it work.
“He perceived the world often as the shortest person in the room and it forced him to behave like the biggest person in the room,” Hawke recently told CNN.
Before filming, Linklater had explained to Hawke that he wanted the movie to have the feel of Rodgers and Hart’s hit song Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered from the pair’s 1940 musical Pal Joey.
“It’s an eight-minute song and it’s brilliant,” Hawke tells me. “It has all these tones and moods and is kind of a jazz song, and it’s so funny and sad and kind of sexy and heart-breaking. Rick wanted the movie to feel like a 90-minute Rodgers and Hart song, to break your heart, be really funny and be enchanting in the way that those songs are enchanting.”
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Linklater, a huge Hart fan, gave Hawke a book to read with all of Hart’s songs.
“There are around 1000 songs and they’re staggeringly beautiful,” Hawke says. “That was such fun … at lunch and going to bed at night I would read these poems, and you could start to understand the intellect that I was trying to access, his playfulness with language, his ease with ideas.”
While Hawke rose to stardom after working on Before Sunrise with Linklater, he first gained recognition and became a teen pin-up as one of Robin Williams’ students in Peter Weir’s 1989 film, Dead Poet’s Society. Hawke handed Weir his Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
“Peter was my first great mentor, so it meant the world to me,” Hawke says. “I was very young and I met a great artist, and I got to see firsthand what that looks like. I didn’t realise how lucky I was to have him as a first mentor until later.”
Hawke made sure to visit Weir when he was in Australia filming 2009’s Daybreakers and 2014’s Predestination with the Spierig brothers. Since then, Hawke has gone from strength to strength. His recent Black Phone horror/mystery movies (2021 and 2025) have been huge hits, as has his 2025 comedy-drama TV series The Lowdown, while another new film, this year’s historical drama The Weight, co-starring Russell Crowe, is now premiering in Sundance before moving on to Berlin.
Hawke is also preparing his 10th film with Linklater, a kind of 19th-century hangout movie concerning transcendentalism, which has been in the works since 1998 and which he says could be their best film ever.
But will there be another Before film? After all, Before Sunrise became a cult classic and audiences widely embraced the sequels. If a fourth movie were made might there be a break-up?
“No, no, they’re not going to break up,” Hawke says. “If there’s another movie, it would be shot in Vienna, and it would be a closing statement. The trouble is, if we wait too long, all our fans will be deceased.”
Hawke fondly recalls making Before Sunrise in the summer of 1994 in Vienna.
“It was the best summer of my life,” he enthuses. “I’d been directed by some really talented people and had interesting experiences, but it was the first time I was being directed by somebody of my generation, and Rick was so smart and knowledgeable. \
“He thinks about movies differently than other people – he’s really trying to engage in a conversation about cinema and where we are. He didn’t grow up just watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“He was talking to me about Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Bergman and Godard. (Linklater directed Nouvelle Vague, about the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which is currently in cinemas.)
“I felt I was a part of my own generation’s art, rather than like a kid working for somebody. I felt like we were creating something new together and it was an amazing feeling.”
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema.
Blue Moon opens in cinemas on January 29.
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