QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The year is 1943, the place is New York and the weather is rainy. Forty-eight-year-old lyricist Lorenz Hart (Hawke) – one half of the Broadway songwriting duo Rodgers and Hart – collapses in a back alley as a result of profound inebriation. He catches pneumonia. Four days later, he dies in hospital. Rewind seven months. Hart attends the opening night party of Oklahoma, his former artistic partner Richard Rodgers’s new show. His spirits are high, and abundant alcohol consumption is indeed on the menu. Yet his cognitive skills are immaculate. The man is a chatterbox. Roughly 80% of this 100-minute film consists of his extensive soliloquies, laments and self-centred conversations.

Hart has an enormous ego, with a touch of self-deprecation and kindness thrown in for measure. He becomes indignant that a beautiful young man whom he invites to a private party only ever heard one of his songs. And he nearly faints with embarrassing when a boy describes his compositions as “sloppy”.

The only human being for whom Hart seems to have some admiration is his protege Elisabeth (Margaret Qualley), a gorgeous and impeccably dressed woman in her late 20s. While there is no physical attraction, instead they have a sincere “devotion” to one another. Hart’s sexual predilections lie with the same sex, something he openly discusses and advertises. He explains to an unimpressed heterosexual associate why semi-erect penises are more attractive than throbbing hard ones. And he is extremely excited to share his views on large cocks with poor Elisabeth, who once failed to make love to a gorgeous stud because the condom wasn’t big enough for his mammoth manhood.

This isn’t the first time a very straight Ethan Hawke embraces a gay character. Just two years ago, he played a homosexual cowboy in Almodovar’s Strange Way of Life. There is little doubt that the 54-year-old American actor possesses a broad range of acting skills. His Lorenz Hart is highly Camp and energetic. A little caricatural even, but that was presumably an integral part of his artistic persona. Our protagonist talks eloquently and incessantly, with a very sharp tongue. While tiring, this is not incompatible with a word craftsman. One of the problems here is that Hart’s excessive confidence extends into the script, which ends up slipping into empty banter and intelectual intoxication. The other one is a lot more serious: the tonsorial offence that the hair and make-up artists inflicted on Hart’s character is a grievous one.

Linklater’s humanistic touch is mostly absent in Blue Moon. The film script is virtually a monologue, and it lacks the spontaneity associated with the 64-year-old American director. Instead, the focus is on namedropping, vacuous punchlines and generic bitchery. The music numbers are very timid, perhaps because Hart was a lyricist, and not a musician. He does briefly sing the titular Blue Moon, as well as a couple of lyrics from My Funny Valentine. Not enough to lift the spirits of the audience though. Those expecting a musical biopic are in for a huge disappointment.

But the biggest issue with Blue Moon is that it is extremely monotonous. The incessant dialogue is tedious. The diegetic music (a faint piano in the background) is repetitive. The colour palette is dull. The camerawork and the montage are unimaginative and boring, consisting mostly of medium shots strictly abiding by the 180-degree rule. To top it all up, the flashforward sequence in the beginning of the film does not connect with the rest of the story. There is no clear reason as to why these specific events seven months earlier contributed to Hart’s untimely death. Blue Moon is a highly esoteric endeavour: a film that could be appreciated by those who knows his work, yet unlikely to win any new fans over.

Blue Moon just premiered in the Official Competition of the 75th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival.