Art and Life in Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague”
Leave it to Richard Linklater to see how, in art, the fundamental things apply. In his two new movies—“Blue Moon,” about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, and “Nouvelle Vague,” about the director Jean-Luc Godard’s making of “Breathless”—the central conflicts involve time. Linklater has made two dozen features in a career now in its fourth decade; having learned to work the clock, he finds pathos in the idea of two artists at risk of being late. “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague” are being released two weeks apart (on October 17th and 31st, respectively), a happy accident highlighting their connections in Linklater’s cinematic universe.
“Blue Moon” is set in New York, mainly in the bar at Sardi’s, on March 31, 1943—the night of the première of “Oklahoma!,” the musical that Hart’s longtime collaborator, the composer Richard Rodgers, created with another writer, Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart (Ethan Hawke)—let’s call him Larry, as people do in the movie, to distinguish the character from the real-life Hart—walks out on the show’s title number and takes refuge at the bar. He’s bitter and jealous, aware that the show will be a big hit and that he could never have written it. But he’s nonetheless sincere when venting to the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), that it’s sentimental and phony, and that this artificial sweetness is crucial to its success.
The story involves two waiting games. Larry knows that he’ll have to put on a brave face when Rodgers, Hammerstein, and their entourage arrive. He’s also waiting for a woman, who, he tells Eddie, is twenty and beautiful. He is forty-seven, with a slicked-down comb-over, and all too conscious of being short and wizened. In other words, the vainly hopeful Larry is about to endure twin humiliations, leaving him feeling bumped out of his life and into the past—a has-been, instantly old. Eddie, like many, assumes that Larry is gay, but the songwriter says that he’s “omnisexual,” a conceit that’s vital to his creativity: “How can you be the chorus of the world without having the chorus of the whole world inside you?”
Without Rodgers, though, Larry’s inner chorus is silenced. When Rodgers (Andrew Scott), known as Dick, enters, Larry courts him with sarcasm and self-promotion. Dick assures him that their collaboration needn’t be over but demands that Larry, who is alcoholic, stop showing up late (or failing to show up at all) to songwriting sessions. “It’s a business,” Dick says. But their differences are creative, too. When Larry criticizes “Oklahoma!” and suggests that they join forces on a caustic satire, Dick says, “People want shows to have some emotional core. They want to feel what we’re fighting for.” Dick has his finger on the pulse of wartime America; Larry doesn’t.
Linklater, working with a script by Robert Kaplow, brings in an array of historical characters, including The New Yorker’s E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who commiserates with Larry’s feeling of being “superannuated”; a viperish child musical-theatre prodigy called “little Stevie” (Cillian Sullivan), whose last name, though never stated, is evidently Sondheim; and, above all, Larry’s date, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an aspiring production designer studying at the Yale School of Fine Art. (Weiland’s correspondence with Hart survives, and Kaplow based his script on it.) Larry’s extended tête-à-tête with her in the bar’s cloakroom, a mutually thrilling and embarrassing psychosexual tangle, is bruising for him—even in ways that, perversely, he’d planned—yet he somehow comes out with his dignity just about intact.
Much of Larry’s dignity is intellectual. Kaplow’s script gives him waspishly insightful riffs on theatre, music, movies, and life—torrents of thought and feeling that, in the compact form of his lyrics, remained dammed up. “Blue Moon” revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling. His makeup (including dark contact lenses that lend his fixed gaze wild intensity and fathomless depth) renders him unrecognizable and is eerily compelling, while his vocal self-transformation is nothing short of miraculous. The force of Larry’s personality forges the movie into a seemingly uninterrupted image of time passing—and passing him by.
“Nouvelle Vague” suggests Linklater’s ambition by way of its title—not “The Godard Story” or “The ‘Breathless’ Story” but the name of a movement, the New Wave, announcing this as a collective portrait. The film, shot in French, anchors veneration of Godard in the portrayal of two groups from which the first flowering of his art was inextricable. One group comprises his fellow-critics at Cahiers du Cinéma—foremost, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer—who fought alongside him for the concept of auteurship (the artistic primacy of the director), and then put this doctrine into action in movies of their own. The other is the cast and crew of “Breathless,” who didn’t share his artistic obsession but deferred to his peculiar methods.
Linklater tells the story of a young man in a hurry. It is 1959 and Godard—or, rather, the character Jean-Luc (Guillaume Marbeck)—calls himself a failure for not having made his first feature by twenty-five, the age at which Orson Welles made “Citizen Kane.” Moreover, his four closest Cahiers friends all have first films completed or under way; Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” is about to première at the Cannes Film Festival. Fearful of being left behind, Jean-Luc steals money from the Cahiers cash box and heads to the festival. There, he manages to persuade the producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to produce “Breathless,” based on an outline that Godard and Truffaut had written years before.
