'Blue Moon' review: Oscar-nominated Ethan Hawke delivers a performance for the ages

WHAT IT'S ABOUT In "Blue Moon," the lyricist Lorenz Hart reflects on his life during an evening at the Theater District mainstay Sardi's while it hosts the opening night party for his former creative partner Richard Rodgers' groundbreaking musical "Oklahoma!"

Ethan Hawke plays Hart, whose contributions to the Great American Songbook include "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," and other standards. Richard Linklater ("Before Sunrise"), who has been working with Hawke for decades, directs the movie, written by Robert Kaplow (whose "Me and Orson Welles" novel was also brought to the screen by Linklater).

Co-stars include Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott as Rodgers. The movie has earned two Oscar nominations: One for Hawke, and the other for Kaplow.

MY SAY Set on March 31, 1943, "Blue Moon" finds the 47-year-old Hart at a crossroads: His collaborator has tasted incredible success with Oscar Hammerstein II. A musical that he scorns for lyrics like "We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand," has been rapturously received. He's infatuated with a younger woman named Elizabeth Weiland (Qualley), who may not return his feelings. The world seems to be passing him by.

The movie unfolds amid that heartbreak. It finds Hart working the room at Sardi's as he had so many times before, glad-handing, regaling Cannavale's bartender and the author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who happens to be at a nearby booth. He has no shortage of stories and opinions and hopes and desires. He never seems to stop talking.

But melancholy sets in. Linklater, a master at conveying the passage of time on screen ("Boyhood"), frames the picture as an elegy for Hart, who would be dead about eight months later, and the world he knew.

It's a transitional moment artistically, with his partner moving on to a future of indelibly shaping the American theater. Hart's distaste for the classic and bad-mouthing of it to anyone who will listen says as much as anything about the business leaving him behind.

It marks an end of something personally, both in the dissolution of that partnership with Rodgers (they'd work together one final time, on a revival of "A Connecticut Yankee") and in other devastating ways that become clear over the course of the movie.

Taking place almost exclusively at Sardi's, spanning every corner of the restaurant, the movie envelops you into this world. 

It lives and breathes thanks to Hawke's astonishing work. The actor undergoes a physical transformation — the 5'10 "Hawke convincingly portrays the 5-foot Hart, with the aid of some staging tricks. But more than that, it's a performance that embodies what acting can be at its finest. In Hawke's hands, Hart's manic socializing serves as a defense mechanism, a brave front, a desperate way to push back against the looming darkness. The circumstances might be unique, but the feelings are universal, and the actor makes them real.

BOTTOM LINE Hawke delivers a performance for the ages in one of Richard Linklater's best movies.