Blue Moon (2025) review

Months before his passing away at the age of 48 (from pneumonia), lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) drops by Sardi's restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan where he chats with bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), piano player Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees) and writer E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), waxes poetically over his 'protégé,' Yale sophomore Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), and awaits the arrival of long-time collaborator Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) to (begrudgingly) congratulate him on Oklahoma!, the production he created with new partner Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney).  Although the world of musical theatre is - and I'll put this lightly - a smidge elitist, Hawke's performance is garrulous and inviting, revealing an active and playful mind that's enamored with language itself, except despite Linklater's best efforts it is still a filmed play, and its appeal wears out with the nonstop (and sometimes redundant) rambling.  There are some fun moments scattered throughout, like Hart meeting a very young Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan) and a college-aged George Roy Hill (David Rawle), as well as giving White the idea of what would be come his classic children's book Stuart Little, but this biopic ultimately reduces him to a repressed homosexual who deludes himself into believing the love of a woman can "cure" his "condition."