BLUE MOON (2025) Review

Sony Pictures Classics

There’s a certain magic in watching Richard Linklater return to the intimacy of character-driven storytelling. After experimenting with bigger canvases and some other detours, Blue Moon feels like a homecoming — not to Austin or adolescence, but to the beating heart of American artistry. The film captures one fateful New York night in 1947 — the evening Oklahoma! opened on Broadway — and in doing so, paints a bittersweet portrait of friendship, legacy, and the fleeting nature of applause.

Linklater’s direction is commanding yet restrained, as if he knows this story doesn’t need cinematic fireworks to leave an impression. He builds a chamber piece of conversation and quiet revelation, where every puff of cigar smoke and every ice cube hitting crystal glass seems to echo with memory. The production design, costuming, and cinematography are exquisite — a perfectly aged snapshot of 1940s New York, all tuxedos and whiskey haze, elegant without feeling museum-staged.

At its core, though, Blue Moon is a story of two men who built something eternal — and one of them who feared time would erase him from it. Ethan Hawke gives a career-best performance as lyricist Lorenz Hart, playing him like a man who never learned how to leave the glow of the bright lights. Hart is funny, tragic, endlessly performing for an audience that isn’t always there. Hawke peels back his charm until what’s left is a portrait of quiet heartbreak — a man terrified not just of being alone, but of being forgotten. It’s easily his most vulnerable work since First Reformed. Andrew Scott, as Richard Rodgers, is the perfect counterbalance — all composure and restraint. His Rodgers is weary of Hart’s chaos but tethered to him by affection and duty. Together, their chemistry finds its pinnacle in a five-minute stairwell scene that will likely go down as one of the year’s finest acting showcases. It’s a duet of love, frustration, and resignation — two modern greats giving a masterclass without ever feeling like they’re trying to.

Margaret Qualley is another standout as Elizabeth, the wide-eyed college student caught between admiration and desire. Her every glance toward Hart carries a complicated cocktail of curiosity, adoration, and longing. There’s a moment late in the film where she gazes at him with the kind of heartbreak usually reserved for finales — it’s devastating in its restraint.

Even the lesser seen supporting players hum with purpose. Bobby Cannavale, as the bartender at Sardi’s, plays like the warm-up act to Hart’s tragedy — a gruff but kind observer whose small moments of levity soften the film’s heavier beats. His presence gives the movie that touch of Linklater humanity — the way strangers become silent witnesses to the art and pain of others.

What makes Blue Moon special isn’t just its period authenticity or musical nostalgia; it’s how deeply it understands creative partnerships. The film knows that collaboration can be both salvation and slow death — that for every timeless melody, there’s a lyricist quietly unraveling in the wings. In a season sure to be filled with louder, flashier contenders, Blue Moon stands as something gentler — an elegant, deeply felt salute to a bygone era and the complicated men who defined it. Linklater has crafted one of his most mature films to date — a movie that hums like an old record, full of warmth, melancholy, and the faint crackle of genius fading into silence. It is a tender, gorgeously acted portrait of legacy and longing — and proof that Richard Linklater can still find poetry in the quietest rooms.

🍿 SCORE = 85 / 100