Blue Moon (2025)

Every staging trick in Blue Moon is aimed at making Ethan Hawke look shorter, and early on you watch the tricks instead of the actor. Then Hawke starts talking and none of that matters anymore. The movie is one night in 1943 at Sardi’s, where Lorenz Hart has slipped out of the premiere of the new musical his old partner Richard Rodgers wrote without him. Hart holds court at the bar with Bobby Cannavale’s patient bartender and a piano player, needles everyone in reach, and waits on Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth, a Yale art student he is too hopeful about. Andrew Scott is excellent as Rodgers, fond but wary. Richard Linklater keeps it to one room and lets the talk do everything, including a sweet bit where Hart hands E. B. White an idea about a mouse. It’s wall-to-wall words, so if Hart wears on you early, you’re stuck. Critics went 90%. An 8.0 because Hawke is spectacular and the sadness sneaks up on you. $9,374 says you end up at a hotel bar this month pretending it’s 1943.

What works: Ethan Hawke gives a dazzling, heartbreaking performance, and Linklater makes a single bar feel like a whole world.

What doesn’t: The tricks used to make Hawke look shorter are distracting, and the nonstop talk will wear out anyone who doesn’t warm to Hart early.

Who it’s for: Broadway nerds, Linklater loyalists and people who could listen to one great talker all night.