“Blue Moon” (2025) directed by Richard Linklater and co-written with Ethan Hawke, is a film that intertwines music, memory, and longing in a narrative shaped by the life and work of the legendary songwriting duo Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. It stars Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, and Hawke himself. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Broadway, a time when musical theater was rapidly evolving into a defining American art form, the film explores how Hart’s deeply personal lyrics, often filled with yearning, wit, and melancholy, mirrored his own life.

It is a film of quiet devastation, a single night stretched into a lifetime of longing. Set within the warmly lit yet isolating walls of Sardi’s bar in 1943, it lingers in the melancholy of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), a man eclipsed by the brilliance of his former collaborator, Richard Rodgers. The film is not a biopic in the traditional sense,...