Directed by Richard Linklater | Written by Robert Kaplow | ▲▲▲▲
An earlier version of this review ran during the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
We open on Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, the production working hard to diminish his height and looks) dying alone in the rain in a New York alley in 1943. We flash back six months to a pain-drenched night when his longtime friend and collaborator, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), is about have a huge hit with Oklahoma! opening on Broadway, with new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) having written the lyrics instead of Hart.
The movie presents Hart as a lover of beauty and a pansexual. History records him as one of the most talented lyricists of the Great American Songbook, having written songs like “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon.”
The first act is practically all monologue, with Hart wandering out of the opening night of Oklahoma!, which he hates, to the bar, Sardi’s, where the post-show celebration is scheduled to take place and ranting about his passions, obsessions, and frustrations. Hart gets a head start on the festivities with the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), and another barfly, writer EB White (Patrick Kennedy), before Rodgers and Hammerstein show up. There’s a lot of talk his encounter with a young performer, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley, well cast as the object of Hart’s obsession), and when she arrives she doesn’t disappoint.
There’s much in this movie that I generally don’t enjoy — the staginess of a single location, an excessively wordy script that eschews anything approaching realism, with its themes repeatedly hammered like a drunk’s fist on the bar: the fleeting rewards of artistic pursuit, the mercurial nature of youth. But this is also one of those cases where you can’t help but wish people actually spoke like this — the certainly, the poetry, and the wit in the screenplay is undeniable. And anyone who’s been the victim of an unrequited love will appreciate what Hart is going through, and how he self-medicates the inevitable disappointment as his professional and personal opportunities seem to be ebbing.
Hawke’s performance makes sure you see beyond the makeup and the theatricality — which distracts at first if you know him well, and don’t we all? — but he’s so magnetic, both working hard and making it work: Hart’s self-destructive streak, his alcoholism, and bruised ego wrestle with his hunger for another moment with Elizabeth — he wants her, sure, but even more he just wants to be in her presence. Linklater’s choice to score the film with a diagetic solo piano is a brilliant touch. A sad, gorgeous piece.
