The conversion of a musical comedy composition into a popular songbook staple is an exercise in de-contextualization. Pronouns lose their referents, as all the ‘I’s, ‘we’s, and ‘us’es that might have meant something to someone collapse into the great void of generality. What a coup! To poach “my baby” from Easter Parade and drag it away from Irving and Fred entirely. To standardize musical comedy means to generalize a composition until it no longer exists in its own story—until it can be applied to yours at will.
What I mean is: in its original context, to utter “My funny Valentine” over that exquisite shaken cocktail of six musical notes is to address a specific individual named Valentine. “Is your figure less than Greek?” muses Val’s would-be lover, Billie, a character in a musical comedy. “Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart?” Naturally, interpreters as disparate as Chet Baker, Rod Stewart, and Ella Fitzgerald recognized, in the sublime syllabic sling of this comic situation, the whiff of the universal. Asked in their new contexts—this is to say, a freestanding, popular recording—these questions that used to push along the little-remembered plot of a Rodgers and Hart musical (and later Judy Garland-starring film adaptation), Babes in Arms, are nudged into the terrain of pop music. They must mean everything at once to the listener who, having turned to the pop standard as temporary salve, finds in them reflected the face of their own pain and pang, their own affectionately flawed beloved. Billie and Val get consigned to history.
Richard Linklater says that his interest in Lorenz Hart came about simply: he liked the songs. “Just a fan I guess,” Linklater admitted. “…really dialed into Rodgers and Hart, first via Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook album.” Why doubt him? Loving a song is more than enough motivation to wonder how it ever got out into the world, and Fitzgerald, like Linklater, is one of the great modern interpreters of human behavior. Both know full well that the variable cultural objects we wrench up are invariably encoded with the worlds that created them. We are fruiting bodies—every human body committing every human act eventually ends in dust, refuse, and worms; it’s one of our species’ least pleasant traditions, the way we react to time. As such, and to cope, we invented time capsules called songs, paintings, plays—things that, in a contradictory motion, gather up eternity the more they accumulate time. To consider these objects, then, is also to excavate their authors’ worlds, partially preserved and ripe with revelations. I’ve always loved the word we use for remounting a musical comedy: revival.
Movies about songwriters fail most often when they attempt to showcase the songwriting act in action—for all its romance, the art of cajoling together syllables, melody, and the occasional strain of dissonance is a largely un-theatrical process. Either you’re Mozart and it all arrives preformed and divine, or you scratch like the rest of us with a stick in the mud. Neither is much fun to witness in real-time. And real-time is important to Richard Linklater because it allows characters the agency to tell their stories. It minimizes the cruelty of narrative twists and alleviates the author’s temptation to speak through the story’s characters to land polemical points. And so, a real-time story about the songwriter of “Blue Moon” must itself be an act as (perhaps) much of Hart’s own life was. It performs something like Hart-ness—moving-sidewalk paeans to art and taste and how they matter, quicksilver bitterness, a dynamic self-loathing almost as dazzling as the wit by which it camouflages itself, vulgarity, bitchiness, loneliness, gnashing—to show how much inexpressible is expressed in “my” and “funny” and “valentine.”
Regarding “My Funny Valentine”: it was Hart who wrote the lyrics and Richard Rodgers the music. Their partnership yielded 28 original stage musicals spanning a period between 1919 and Hart’s death in 1943. The co-authors of over 500 individual compositions, their commercial and critical success on the New York stage was practically unrivaled for as long as it lasted. Then it was almost definitively eclipsed, both contemporaneously and in the collective memory of the American stage: on the night of March 31st, 1943, the first collaboration between Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma!, opened on Broadway. Like the calamitous choral yawp that informs that musical’s title track, it was an immediate hit, and inaugurated a run of collaborations that form the backbone of classical American musical theater. Think Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific, The Sound of Music.
(Regarding “My Funny Valentine” and not to get too vulgar with auteurism: it’s perhaps not a stretch to see in the noted physical qualities of ‘Valentine’ the same imperfections Hart spent his days self-conscious of. “One was tall, handsome, self confident and aloof,” the music critic Stephen Holden wrote of Rodgers, continuing, “the other pint-size (barely five feet tall), witty, lovable, and consumed with self-loathing for his physical shortcomings.” It’s curious to see Holden’s writing cited but rewritten—adapted, revived, standardized—in perhaps the saddest sentence any anonymous soul has authored on Wikipedia: “The description of Valentine was consistent with Lorenz Hart’s own insecurities and belief that he was too short and ugly to be loved.”)
On November 22nd of that same year, less than eight months after the boffo birth of Oklahoma!, Hart was found in a gutter, drunk and feverish. Four days later, he died of complications from pneumonia, just 47 years old. The body of work he created with Rodgers—not just “Valentine,” but “This Can’t Be Love,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Manhattan,” and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”—are less a backbone than a corona, a fluid mood of the weird and inciting eccentrics that surround and confound us. Almost all are predominantly remembered in their excerpted, popularly-recorded contexts, performed over and over again like so many rosy bullets through history.
To excavate Lorenz’ (called Larry’s) story, Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow take for their title one of Hart’s most direct—and so, for a writer proud of his witty curlicues and complex interior rhyme schemes, perhaps counter-intuitively, best—lyrics: “Blue moon, you saw me standin’ alone/ Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.” For their occasion, the filmmakers take that fateful Spring night when Oklahoma! opened, a happening that, in Kaplow’s telling, yields Longfellow’s “ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing”; as Rodgers and Hammerstein rise, Hart falls.
Like a real-time nightmare play, Hart (Ethan Hawke) haunts Sardi’s bar and hounds its hangers-on in the moments before Rodgers and his golden entourage arrive fresh from Oklahoma!’s final curtain, good reviews pouring in and history asserting its grim that’s entertainment grip. He resists drowning his bitterness in amber bourbon (for a while), and redirects his obsessive expoundings into an anticipated re-meeting with Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a Yale art student with whom Hart shares a chaste correspondence. “I’m telling you, this is beyond sex,” he boasts at one point, which begs: what’s beyond sex between a maybe-closeted 47-year-old alcoholic washup and a 20-year-old would-be ingénue who treats him somewhere between affectionate pet and older sister?
By the time Rodgers (Andrew Scott) shows up, Blue Moon bears down on Hart like something Greek. Linklater has never shirked from showing the psychic and emotional energies spiking off of his characters through blocking. In a particularly apt mid-movie sequence, Rodgers rests literally a few steps up on a Sardi’s staircase, desperately trying to break off and away towards the party in Oklahoma!’s (and his) honor. Consigned to the lower landing, Hart clings, first to Rodgers’ ramrod demeanor, then to his own knocking elbows, and finally to the bannister, which he follows back down to the bar where Blue Moon starts and ends.
Actually, the film starts with Hart’s end, three times over. Its two epigraphs re-member the man in other peoples’ words: Hammerstein’s is a curt reminder that Larry was “alert and fun to be around,” while Mabel Mercer’s shouts the quiet part loud: “He was the saddest man I ever knew.” Then we watch a rain-soaked Larry ramble drunk under the rain in a back alley, barely eking out “Everything Happens to Me” under his wheezing breath. “…Triple rhyme,” he warbles, admiring songwriters Adair and Dennis’s tricky triplicate before collapsing. Then it’s the WQXR obituary, intoning over Larry’s writhing. And then: seven months earlier, Oklahoma!’s closing number, Larry ditching the bows of a surefire hit he reviles for the relative comfort of a barstool at Sardi’s.
As a bit of clever screenwriting, framing Blue Moon with Hart’s inevitable end should be annoying. It’s a little hacky, bailing out on the promise of vulnerability—what if we were able to decide for ourselves if this man’s story were sad or not?—in order to not risk appearing flat or stolid. It’s a calculated aesthetic choice, rather than an attempt to push the tidiness of writing towards the sprawl of being alive. In these ways, it’s not entirely out of step with Hart’s own writerly preference for a nimble lyric rather than risk repetition, or worse, what already came. “We know we belong to the land,” intones the seesawing chorus of Oklahoma!. “Here comes ‘grand’” Hart sighs, which is, of course, Hammerstein’s next lyric.
(Sharper, more gossipy minds than mine have speculated on Hart’s sexuality. Surely, the conjured Larry of Blue Moon himself speaks winkingly about it: “Doc Bender said to me the other night—after I told him I’d proposed to Vivienne again—she turned me down, again—he said, ‘Larry, make up your mind. Are you homosexual or heterosexual?’” Beyond piling on speculations, I will say that there is a fluidity prized in Hart’s lyrics, a priority of motion and becoming—rather than existing as-such—that pings the work of other queer poets like Cole Porter, Essex Hemphill, or Noël Coward. Wit maneuvers around the status quo of language. It is an escape valve, then, for those whose image does not fit readily within the theater of a straight world. “He’s so earthbound,” Larry complains of Hammerstein’s land–grand connection, which maybe puts us in mind of Jose Muñoz: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.” The Larry of Blue Moon idealizes plenty: the athletic prose of E.B. White, the aesthetic image of Elizabeth, Rodgers’ masculine compositional instinct, the capacity for a shot of liquor to liberate the tongue. I wonder if that idealism—that no-place utopianism—is a reaction to being cast as “the saddest man you ever knew.”)
In practice, though, establishing Hart’s death as thematically preordained plays less like operatic tragic irony than unsentimental remembrance. There are many facets of Blue Moon to admire, not least of which are Hawke’s berserker performance (he performs his rapid-fire speeches and monologue scales like a songwriter without a singing voice, a uniquely confident and melancholy mixture), as well as Kaplow’s gabby script, which admirably conjures that first (and nearly-last) moment in New York City’s cultural history when musical theater felt like a genuinely modern art form. But if Blue Moon is to be remembered with the same affection that many of the songs it revives throughout its run are, it will be because of the total devotion Linklater demonstrates in telling a story of the saddest man you ever knew in distinctly unsentimental terms. In turn and in this way, it’s because it constructs a portrait of Hart more emotionally in tune with his art than any that hung at Sardi’s or otherwise.
Sentimentality is a tricky operation. To take Larry at his word, such blatant farming-out of the sentimental urge is what’s behind Oklahoma! being “fraudulent,” both a “14-karat hit and a 14-karat piece of shit.” He waxes rat-a-tat rhapsodic to Eddie the bartender (Bobby Canavale) and Morty the enlisted house pianist (Jonah Lee) about how Rodgers and Hammerstein have composed an ode to corn pone pastoralia rather than a send-up of it. He expresses righteous indignation at audiences laughing at what he terms third-rate jokes. “What are you laughing at?” Hawke steams. “Come on, demand more!”
How to survey what amounts to popular entertainment and not feel like Larry Hart? The unique aspect of song in musical theater is that it represents transformation. Singing on the American musical theater stage indicates a character’s entry into an emotional register too volatile for mere spoken language. Better to braid these expressions with melody and singing, those forces better able to reach ascension. To the songwriter of musical theater, staidness is anathema to transformation. Rather than reassure spectators of their own feelings, songs change us. This tendency is largely absent on the contemporary American musical stage, where allergism to craft, abandonment of trust in the audience, and general slavishness to the bottom line have advanced so far that songs mostly just ferry IP around. What if the air you breathed was rarer when attached to melody? This was Hart’s gift, and a gift he shared with his characters. To attach beautiful sentences to provocative thoughts (as Kaplow does for Hawke) is the gift art gives its stewards. In the presence of love, lust, or loss, suddenly: un-characteristic access to a language more agile and able to break through the literality of life.
Of course, this was Hammerstein’s gift, too. Rather than Hart’s polysyllabic acrobatics, it simply expressed itself with a naturalism so embodied as to appear unconsidered. In fact, it was language revised within an inch of every word’s implication.“All the sounds of the earth are like music,” and again: “all the sounds of the earth are like music.” And then what the sounds are (“The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree”) and then how they move the singer (“And an old weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me: o, what a beautiful mornin’.”) I don’t think Linklater and Kaplow have any scorn for Oklahoma!, even as they allow Larry his. If, in its time, Oklahoma! was a box-lunch, box-office hit, it endured decades of being remembered in the American musical imagination as an endorsement of frontier individualism, rather than a rebuke of it. It wasn’t until 2018, when director Daniel Fish placed the musical back in its own context—settler colonialism, the deadly entitlement some white men feel—that Oklahoma! felt turbulent again. A similar cross-time operation struck Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey, which, when it debuted in 1940 featuring an antihero as its comic center, struck audiences as too sour by half. “Although it is expertly done, how can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkinson wrote in his contemporaneous review for the Times. By the time the show was revived in 1952, post-war audiences were more readily able to accept musical theater painted in darker hues, in no small measure due to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s continued effort to haul that formerly-frivolous art towards ideas about the business of being alive.
This is the brutal double-park of Blue Moon, a total ceding of space for Hart to wax (in phantom revival, from beyond the grave) at length about his philosophies and tastes without tilting the movie into blind endorsement of any of those variable opinions. When, in the film, Larry marshals his leaking desperation at Rodgers and pitches a quasi revue-satire about Marco Polo that, even in 1943, sounds piteously outdated, he seems deliriously out of touch, not only with his (soon to be former) partner’s aspirations, but also with what musical theater could be. Which is to say, as serious an art as any other. Which is to say, what Larry and Richard tried to make it, for a while. This is the pair that saw glittering music and balletic intervention in Mark Twain’s sludge-grim apocalyptic 1889 satire, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And this is how Rodgers fends Larry’s Marco Polo dud off, offering that the pair can get to work reviving their 1927 version of Twain’s story with a smattering of new songs, so long as Larry can stay off the booze and commit to regular work hours. Larry swears he can and will. Historically, he did, if only sort of. One of those new compositions, “To Keep My Love Alive,” is one of Hart’s most endearing compositions, a Bluebearded “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” written explicitly for Vivienne Segal, another object of Hart’s scrambled desire and the mouthpiece who introduced audiences to “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” in Pal Joey’s original run.“I married many men, a ton of them,” Hart’s lyrics lilt, “a ton of them. / Because I was untrue to none of them, because I bumped off every one of them / To keep my love alive.” It was the last song he wrote before his death.
In the context of A Connecticut Yankee, “To Keep My Love Alive” is sung by Queen Morgan Le Fay, that show’s heel. Its humorous collation of dispatched former lovers exemplifies Hart’s love of an art that’s always on the move, all rhymes on the insides, of bodies, of feelings. It is a missive sung by a charming figure who will be vanquished by the narrative’s end. Morgan isn’t the Connecticut Yankee—she isn’t even Merlin. Nobody ever loved her that much.
(No matter how zealously the songwriter of musical theater cries “character!” some shard of reflection pours into each song. And so maybe it’s best that Larry’s art lingers most as vehicles for other artists to recombobulate their feelings in. A standard pops. It lets its author take their stand, chips falling where they may. The gift of the pop standard is that it always exists in conversation, between listener and interpreter, between. Devotion is inherent in pop music, I think. It invokes hope and despair equally and then gives them voice. I heard somebody whisper please adore me. And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold.)
Especially as regards historical-cinematic treatments of queer suffering, Blue Moon is too spritely to capitulate to self-tragedy. It’s also nimbly elegiac about a certain strain of art, both its making and and criticism. It’s the rare life-story written in the parlance of its subject, inoculated from phoniness seemingly contradictively—via pure performance itself. It is an essay on art performed by a narrative feature film that nevertheless maintains a near-urgent sense of unease regarding its subject’s operating philosophies. Here is the biopic rendered in contradiction, storytelling under realistic, real-time conditions that occasions spontaneous song and occasionally ascendent poesy.
The fallout of Blue Moon is an assertive, pile-driving movie star performance from Ethan Hawke, but most compelling is how Linklater and his collaborators have rendered this occasion to tell about a life (even a night’s life) in the terms one uses to speak about art itself. Which is just living and dying by another name. Which is what a song does. Live and die. It all would have been enough for a film to remember how “I Wish I Were in Love Again” swings. More than that, we have here an insistence of why that swinging matters. Its absence leads us into suicides both dragged out and excruciatingly direct. Its presence is levitation, nothing more, nothing less.