The Broadway Allure of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon

Linklater, who never makes the same movie twice—except when he does it three times, as in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight—is an inveterate formalist who’ll try anything in good faith. A onetime Amer-indie figurehead who leveled up without selling out and isn’t precious about churning out work on the regular, his closest analogue is probably Steven Soderbergh, but with a shaggier and more open-hearted sensibility. Last year’s underrated Hit Man was offered a meditation on identity and impulse disguised as a sexy neo-screwball romp. Here, the director adopts the form of something old-fashioned and even slightly anti-cinematic—the dark-night-of-the-soul-melodrama, set in one location and in near real-time—in an attempt to evoke an idea of a hallowed showbiz past and to distill a Broadway lifer’s potent, melancholy essence.

Linklater is also interested in hinge moments, whether via the-end-of-high-school bacchanal of Dazed and Confused or the temporal gamesmanship of Boyhood. (His ongoing, years-in-the-making adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along fits this template as well.) Blue Moon gives its protagonist a front row seat at the changing of the showbiz guard; the main reason that Larry (Ethan Hawke) finds himself at Sardi’s in Manhattan—beyond the fact that he’s a regular with a long-since pickled liver—is to celebrate Rodgers’s box-office-busting success with Oklahoma!, the crowd-pleaser he’s crafted in collaboration with the more populist-minded lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. The latter was once described by critic Mel Gussow as “monumentally happy and efficient”; in this, he was Hart’s opposite’s number, and behind the scenes, his bête noire, even as they traded encomiums to one another’s genius.

As Linklater’s film opens, Larry is miserable and at loose ends, and happy to tell anybody within earshot why. Rolling in from a sold-out show of Oklahoma!, Larry begs the indulgence of bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and ivory-tickler Mort (Jonah Lees) as he waxes apoplectic about the phoniness of his old buddy’s new hit. “Oklahoma exclamation point!” he sneers, as offended by the title’s punctuation as its embedded exaltation of all things Americana; if Rodgers’s fateful decision to change creative partners in midstream sliced Larry’s self-esteem to ribbons, Hammerstein’s salt-of-the-earth lyrics are like salt in the wound. When the conquering heroes finally show up, though, Larry waxes diplomatic, telling Richard (Andrew Scott) that Oklahoma! is a classic, and likely to run for twenty years. The praise is disingenuous, but the underlying diagnosis of the show’s triumphal, cornpone populism is apt: Imagine a cowboy boot square-dancing on a human face, forever. What Larry particularly resents is the way that Oklahoma!’s apple-pie-eyed exuberance—sweetheart promises and platitudes with all that fringe on top—seeks to infantilize an audience previously weaned on his own repertoire of sly double entendres. It’s not just Richard who’s broken up with Larry, but an entire popular art form.