Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, which stars Ethan Hawke in a brilliant portrayal of the Broadway legend Lorenz Hart, unfolds like a filmed stage play. Picture a curiously empty Sardi’s with spotlighted conversations between Hawke’s Hart and a series of single characters—a bartender played by Bobby Cannavale, a piano player (Jonah Lees), a laconic E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a Yale student named Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). It’s the night of the opening of Oklahoma in 1943, and Hart, former lyricist for Richard Rodgers, is jealous and bitter over the pending success of Rodgers and his new partner, Oscar Hammerstein.
Screenwriter Robert Kaplow has based his script on the real-life letters exchanged between Hart and Weiland, and the happy result for Ethan Hawke is that he gets to declaim Hart’s shrewd, coarse, sardonic, witty, catty, and penetrating observations about the process of writing lyrics for Broadway in general and his objections to Hammerstein’s sentimentality in particular. There are plenty of inside jokes for people familiar with the historical figures and the context: Qualley’s character shows up with a young man who says he wants to be a director; when he introduces himself as George Hill, we can fill in his middle name of Roy. When Hammerstein introduces Hart to his precocious 13-year-old neighbor Stevie, we understand that we’re meeting the young Sondheim. Andrew Scott appears in a fine turn as Richard Rodgers, who is accustomed to being acclaimed by the theater crowd, and who with Hart is in turn aloof, exasperated, and empathic.
We know from the outset that Hart is doomed to die in six months, and that’s the looming outcome that generates the energy of all these conversations. So what we get is a movie that is the antithesis of an action flick. It’s Hart’s night to demonstrate his intellect, his pettiness, his hypocrisy, his limitations, and his genius, and Hawke rises to every occasion. Blue Moon is all character-driven, and it’s all-compelling for anybody who is a fan of “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Blue Moon,” or any of the other 1,000 or so songs Hart wrote with Rodgers over two decades.
Last month I wrote about The Slip, an interesting but ultimately flawed first novel. I have just finished another first novel that is much more accomplished: Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye, an expansive old-fashioned (in the best sense) novel that brings us intimately into the lives of endearing but not saccharine characters. Ryan is the editor of One Story and the author of two short story collections, and his mastery of story-telling (how to pace one effectively, how to develop a character, how to choose the telling detail and gesture) is evident in every chapter. Ryan begins with Cal Jenkins, a regular guy working in his father-in-law’s hardware store who is startled when a strange woman named Margaret Salt enters the store looking for a radio she can turn on to hear the news about the end of World War II. When the announcement comes, she further startles Cal by kissing him. Ryan takes his time in getting us the background for that kiss and for the two characters who engage in it, but we readers are happy to indulge him as we meet Cal’s family and larger circle of acquaintances in the fictional Ohio town of Bonhomie, a distant cousin of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, all with their own stories, all interesting. When Margaret Salt eventually re-enters the novel, she takes a turn at center stage, and then her husband, Felix Salt, rotates into the spotlight. We don’t get a glimpse of the meaning of the title until Page 272, and by then we’ve settled into the back seat of Ryan’s narrative and are happy to let him drive us where he will. Only toward the end, when Ryan speeds his narrative pace to get us to the Vietnam era, does our engagement flag, but not fatally. I loved this big, generous book for its wealth of dynamic characters and for its commitment to following them to their inevitable fates, some sad, some happy, some bittersweet, all ringing true.