Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is not a traditional biopic, but an intimate, elegiac character study focusing on a single, pivotal night in the final months of legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke). The film’s ending, set mostly in the bar of Sardi’s restaurant, culminates not in a dramatic twist but in a crushing emotional resolution: Hart’s final, public rejection by his former creative partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and the young object of his unrequited affection, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). This final, poignant failure to achieve either professional resurrection or personal love is framed by the opening, tragic flash-forward of Hart dying alone, making the film a heartbreaking countdown to a lonely end for a man who wrote the most beloved songs about romance.
To fully appreciate the heartbreaking, inevitable conclusion of Richard Linklater’s masterwork, Blue Moon (2025), one must first grasp that the film is not about the grand arc of a legendary life, but a claustrophobic, one-night tragedy. It’s a drama confined almost entirely to the mahogany and cigarette smoke of Sardi’s restaurant bar on March 31, 1943—the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, the very musical that codified the new, Hammerstein-driven era and officially sealed the end of the monumental, yet volatile, partnership between Lorenz “Larry” Hart and Richard Rodgers.
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