Blue Moon

Directed by Richard Linklater, Blue Moon follows Ethan Hawke’s Lorenz Hart as he reflects on his career right after the launch of his former partner’s (Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers) new musical. Linklater, armed with Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, delivers a watchable (albeit awfully stagy) drama that benefits from Hawke’s terrific, engrossing efforts, and there’s little doubt that the picture, which is rarely as compelling as its star’s performance, ultimately comes off as a decent-enough showcase for Hawke’s superb work – with the movie otherwise suffering from an arms-length atmosphere compounded by Shane F. Kelly’s flat, low-rent visuals and a periodic emphasis on less-than-enthralling digressions. (The latter is never more true than in an extended sequence involving Hart’s tedious, pointless conversation with Margaret Qualley’s grating Elizabeth Weiland.) And while Linklater has admittedly punctuated the proceedings with a few electrifying moments and encounters, with this particularly true of everything involving Scott’s Rodgers, Blue Moon is, in the end, a fairly entertaining portrait of a lonely man that feels like it could (and should) be so much better.

**1/2 out of ****