Richard Linklater is spending 2025 in the past, courtesy of his upcoming French New Wave homage Nouvelle Vague as well as Blue Moon, and the latter—which just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its Oct. 17 theatrical release—demonstrates that he knows his way around yesterday.
A lovingly melancholy tribute to famed 20th-century songwriter Lorenz Hart during the last stanza of his life, the film is a one-night-only character study brimming with intellect, passion, sorrow, and bold, idiosyncratic personality, all of it embodied by a magnificent Ethan Hawke as the eccentric and elegiac lyricist. It’s not just for musical theater historians; as talkative as his Before trilogy, Linklater’s latest is a moving and multifaceted ode to a bygone era and an artist whose creativity and contradictions were equally titanic.
On March 13, 1943, Lorenz walks into Sardi’s, unaware that in seven months, he’ll be found dying of pneumonia in a rainy alley. On this particular evening, his mind is mostly occupied by anguished thoughts about Oklahoma!, whose premiere he’s just ditched, and whose runaway success appears to be a foregone conclusion.
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