Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” pivots on subjects that are taboo in modern American cinema, namely dissolution and failure and disappointment. Yet there’s a sense of transcendence to the film, which shows how much freer a biopic can feel when artists make choices, digging into the manna of someone’s emotional life instead of relying on triumphalist cradle-to-grave clichés.
The protagonist is the famed lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), who, seven months before dying in 1943 at age of 48, spends a boozy night at the iconic Sardi’s. Hart is awaiting the arrival of his former composing partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), who is on the verge of astonishing success with a new show with a new partner, Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). You’ve probably heard of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and if you have any interest in theater you’ve heard of this show: “Oklahoma!”
Most of “Blue Moon” follows Hart as he holds court in the bar. Hart was gay, which the film acknowledges, but he is enamored with a college student named Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). Twice her age, not really into women to begin with, Hart seems to relish deliberately castrating himself. Hawke is playing Hart as playing the role of the grand disappointment, high on his perception, erudition, vice and wasted talent. Hart tries to wear his self-loathing as a fashion statement, in other words.
Despite this elaborate set-up, “Blue Moon” isn’t riven with plot. It’s a highly theatrical, grandiloquent, single-set film that’s also nearly a one-man show. Hawke is straight and a foot taller than Hart, not to mention being, you know, Ethan Hawke, perhaps Gen X’s ideal blend of cool dude and artist who never quite sold out, who still puts his ass on the line for personal projects. And the wonder of Hawke’s performance here is that he somehow acknowledges the distance between himself and his subject and uses that distance to paradoxically draw us closer to the character. Perhaps, we’re seeing a successful modern actor explore our fears of obsolescence by mining his own.
I can’t speak for what Hawke thinks, of course, but that’s at the very least what “Blue Moon” feels like as it unfolds. Hawke has always been an exhilaratingly verbose performer, which is one reason why he’s an ideal collaborator for Linklater, a poet of everyday American speech. Hawke can use his rat-a-tat to build up his sexiness and make his characters seem utterly pathetic, simultaneously. (Think of how subtly his hipster pose curdles in “Reality Bites,” or in Linklater’s “Before Midnight.”)
In “Blue Moon,” Hawke’s rat-a-tat is used to create a stylish and poignant portrait of little man’s syndrome. Hart riffs with the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), and the piano player and a few famous writers passing by. Hart moons over Elizabeth and rues his alcoholism (which would kill him) and the cheapening of theater-goers’ tastes and whatever else seems to pass his mind. There’s an opening here for the film to offer parallels to modern times and problems that Linklater and Hawke have voiced in other projects, namely the blinding anonymity of corporate art. But they don’t push that association; the reverberation is felt and allowed to pass by as other ideas emerge.
Hawke and Linklater and the screenwriter, Robert Kaplow, understand how talk is for many writers and people in general: a kind of performance. That’s the lure of bars, especially for alcoholics who might otherwise be socially awkward. It’s a natural stage — an arc to spin your addiction into what you tell yourself is art. One day maybe you sober up and admit that you were simply playing the clown, if you’re lucky.
For a while, it seems that the filmmakers might be glorifying alcoholism. “Blue Moon” has the effervescent ping of the feeling of boozy possibility before the drug starts to ask for the price that’s to be paid for the revelry. Without our initially noticing, Linklater steers the picture into darker waters, and Hart’s shots of bourbon — just one more — don’t seem so cute anymore. Andrew Scott’s performance as Rodgers is accorded about a cameo’s worth of screen time, but the actor communicates magnitudes.
There’s a heartbreaking moment when Rodgers, more aware of the ravages of Hart’s alcoholism than most, refuses to drink with the man. We feel Hart and Rodgers’ respective agony. Their partnership fell apart from Hart’s drinking, after all, and Rodgers’ refusal to take a drink with Hart is a staunch refusal to enable that Hart absorbs, in the tradition of every alcoholic, as a profound rejection. Scott informs the moment with the right steel and sadness, and Hart’s pleading for Rodgers to hear about a new project becomes a plea to be let in again. Linklater doesn’t underline this stuff for you; it happens under the pop and fizz of the party. The glamour and neurotic undertow give “Blue Moon” the texture of a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Tina Romero’s “Queens of the Dead” has its own voice and sense of style, which are not negligible qualities, especially in the modern horror movie. For those qualities, I was willing to meet it more than halfway, forgiving the fact that it’s all over the place. Opportunities are squandered, the middle act sags, and for a movie with the words “of the dead” in the title it’s rather light on zombies. But the film has spirit.
The setting is Brooklyn, primarily a club that’s to host a drag show that encounters many problems, which will be relatable to theater folks, on its way to realization. An egocentric performer named Yasmine (Dominique Jasmine) figures that she can do better hosting her own show over her phone and bails on the club. A nurse, Sam (Jaquel Spivey), is a former performer torn between stage fright, a desire to earn adult money, and the yearning to return to the stage. There are plumbing issues and problems with rats, which converge in amusing fashion. Trying to put out these and many other fires is the protagonist, Dre (Katy O’Brien), the film’s nucleus of sanity.
Many other personalities emerge, and they are vividly sketched by Romero and a game cast. We are tossed into a frenetic soup and asked to sort everyone out for ourselves, as the film ping-pongs between comic calamities. For its first and best act, “Queens of the Dead” plays as a surprisingly traditional backstage farce, modernized with an awareness of how social media has super-sized our narcissism at the expense of a social collective.
One might assume that the ghouls will intensify this movie’s satire of social media —territory that has been surprisingly under-plumbed by modern zombie cinema. There are moments, such as when the dead are transfixed by their phones in the club, but one would generally be wrong. One might also assume that the zombies may underscore a theme about queer identity, and, while there is some pro forma stuff about honoring yourself, one would again be wrong. I actually found that refreshing. “Queens of the Dead” is very casual about its identity as a queer zombie movie, and that feels more progressive than hackneyed speechifying.
Yes, Tina Romero belongs to that Romero family. Her father, George A. Romero, directed “Night of the Living Dead” and “Dawn of the Dead” and many others and positively owns the zombie subgenre. He invented the zombie as we know it and no zombie film is better than “Night” or “Dawn” or even “Day of the Dead.” At times, it seems that Tina is so determined not to get lost in fealty to her old man that she over-corrects and doesn’t commit to any unifying approach or subtext.
“Queens of the Dead” suggests a mix-tape, then, which is appropriate to the setting come to think of it, and logical for a filmmaker just getting started and experimenting.
In the tradition of 1980s-era horror, it has an engaging WTF quality.
“Blue Moon” and “Queens of the Dead” are in theaters everywhere.
