Leave it to Richard Linklater to see how fundamental things are applied to art. His two new films—Blue Moon, about songwriter Lorenz Hart, and A New Uncertainty, about director Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless—have central conflicts over time. Linklater has made two dozen feature films in a career that is now in its fourth decade; Having learned to work with clocks, he finds pathos in the idea of two artists risking being late. Blue Moon and New Nebula will be released within two weeks of each other (October 17 and 31, respectively), which is a happy coincidence that highlights their connection to Linklater's cinematic universe.
Blue Moon takes place in New York City, mostly at Sardi's, on March 31, 1943—the opening night of Oklahoma!, the musical that Hart's longtime collaborator, composer Richard Rodgers, created with fellow writer Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart (Ethan Hawke) – let's call him Larry, like the people in the film, to distinguish the character from Hart in real life – comes out under the show's title number and takes refuge in a bar. He is bitter and jealous, realizing that the show will be a great success and that he could never write it. But he's sincere nonetheless, telling bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) that it's sentimental and fake, and that this artificial sweetness is critical to success.
The story involves two waiting games. Larry knows he'll have to put on a brave face when Rodgers, Hammerstein and their entourage arrive. He is also waiting for a woman who he tells Eddie is twenty years old and beautiful. He is forty-seven years old, has combed hair, and is all too aware of his short stature and wrinkled appearance. In other words, the hopeless Larry has to endure the double humiliation of making him feel like he has been thrown out of his life into the past – a has-been, instantly aged. Eddie, like many, assumes that Larry is gay, but the songwriter says he is “omnisexual,” a conceit that is vital to his work: “How can you be the choir of the world without having the choir of the world inside you?”
However, without Rogers, Larry's inner choir falls silent. When Rogers (Andrew Scott), known as Dick, enters, Larry courts him with sarcasm and self-promotion. Dick assures him that their collaboration isn't necessarily over, but demands that Larry, an alcoholic, stop showing up late (or not showing up at all) to songwriting class. “It’s a business,” Dick says. But their differences are also creative. When Larry criticizes “Oklahoma!” and proposes joining forces to create biting satire, Dick says: “People want shows to have some emotional core. They want to feel what we stand for.” Dick has his finger on the pulse of wartime America; Larry is gone.
Linklater, working from a script by Robert Kaplow, introduces a variety of historical characters, including New Yorker E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who sympathizes with Larry's feelings of “retirement”; a serpentine child musical theater prodigy named “little Stevie” (Cillian Sullivan), whose last name, although never mentioned, is apparently Sondheim; and, most notably, Larry's companion, Elizabeth Weyland (Margaret Qualley), an aspiring production designer studying at the Yale School of Fine Arts. (Weyland's correspondence with Hart survives, and Kaplow based his screenplay on it.) Larry's lengthy tête-à-tête with her in the bar's locker room, a mutually exciting and embarrassing psychosexual tangle, leaves him bruised—even in ways he, oddly enough, intended—but somehow keeps his dignity largely intact.
Much of Larry's worth is intellectual. Kaplow's script gives him scathingly insightful riffs on theater, music, film and life—streams of thoughts and feelings that remained dammed in the compact form of his lyrics. Blue Moon revels in subtle wit and great soul, and Hawke's embodiment of both is sublime and astonishing. His makeup (including dark contact lenses that give his gaze a wild intensity and bottomless depth) makes him unrecognizable and frighteningly magnetic, while his vocal self-transformation is nothing short of miraculous. The force of Larry's personality turns the film into a seemingly continuous image of time passing – and passing by him.
New Wave hints at Linklater's ambitions through its title—not “The History of Godard” or “The History of the Choking” but the name of the movement, “New Wave,” declaring it a collective portrait. The film, shot in French, cements the veneration of Godard in its portrayal of two groups from which the first flowering of his art was inseparable. One group includes his fellow critics from Laptops for cinema– above all François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer – who together with him fought for the concept of auteurism (the artistic primacy of the director), and then brought this doctrine to life in their own films. The other was the cast and crew of Breathless, who did not share his creative obsession but were subservient to his idiosyncratic methods.
Linklater tells the story of a young man in a hurry. It's 1959, and Godard – or rather the character Jean-Luc (Guillaume Marbeck) – calls himself a failure for not having made his first feature film by the age of twenty-five, the age at which Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. Moreover, four of his closest Laptops all friends have their first films completed or in development; Truffaut's film “The 400 Blows” will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Fearing being left behind, Jean-Luc steals money from Laptops box office and heads to the festival. There he manages to convince producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst) to stage Breathless from a script written by Godard and Truffaut many years ago.
