NZIFF: Blue Moon
A washed-up songwriter drowns his sorrows as his former collaborator triumphantly opens Oklahoma! on Broadway. A career-peak performance by Ethan Hawke powers Richard Linklater’s theatrical drama. The best thing Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) ever wrote was the song 'Blue Moon', a timeless standard – and he hates it, resenting the tossed-off, gorgeous simplicity of his work most embraced by the public. His former composing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) has moved on to work with Oscar Hammerstein. Their first work together, Oklahoma!, was the kind of breakout hit Rodgers and Hart always chased but never achieved. Opening night, 1943, only months before his untimely death, and the short, balding Hart is losing himself in a bottle at famed Broadway hotspot Sardi’s, waiting for the newly minted megahit pair to make their entrance to the afterparty. Blue Moon is a display of director Richard Linklater’s masterful management of tone, rhythm and tension, ensuring that the film remains enthrallingly cinematic even as the action largely plays out in a single space. Through it all, an exceptional Hawke rivets us to the screen. Exasperating, exhausting, heartbreaking, funny, catty; the quiet devastation of Hart’s lonely decline simmers beneath, made all the tougher by the man’s own awareness of his forthcoming doom. — Tom AugustineDramaPT1H40MM2025-08-29Ethan Hawke
Magaret Qualley
Bobby Cannavale
Andrew Scott
Richard Linklater
Mike Blizzard
John Sloss
Richard Linklater
NZIFF: Blue Moon"NZIFF: Blue Moon"Showtimes
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