In Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke delivers a strong, immersive performance in a genre I loathe: entertainment industry period pieces.
Hollywood directors love making movies about writers, directors, actors, and playwrights, despite these people usually being wholly uninteresting to anyone outside of the entertainment industry.
Blue Moon is no exception: sure, Hawke’s depiction of Lorenz Hart, a flamboyant but not entirely out-of-the-closet playwright and songwriter, is well done, but talk about a character who I have absolutely zero interest in. Correction: I still have zero interest in.
Hart of course meets and mingles with other famous people, notably Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, but are they interesting people to put in a movie? No.
Steven Soderbergh is a talented filmmaker who seems to make whatever floats his fancy, and often for cheap: without looking at the production notes, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Blue Moon—set almost entirely inside a bar during an after party celebrating the debut of the play “Oklahoma”—was shot over a weekend on an iPhone. That’s not a criticism of the visuals—it looks good, for what it is—but it can’t possibly be a production that Soderbergh put his heart and soul into.
Hawke truly is excellent here, and it is the kind of “make yourself almost unrecognizable” kind of performance that will catch the attention of award voters—because these people love seeing their own depicted on the big screen.
And to be fair, the movie is moderately entertaining. Despite the story being entirely dialogue driven, Soderbergh keeps the pace moving. It’s certainly not a flat film, with Hawke hawking jokes and constantly flirting and Soderbergh staging each moment with the precision you’d expect.
But Blue Moon can’t escape its trappings: it’s a movie about 100 minutes in the life of a famous playwright who died generations before many of us were born, who is famous for work most of us don’t know. Or care to know.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.
