HKIFF Film Review: Blue Moon 詞聖的醉後一夜 (2025) - USA
Reviewed at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a moment in Richard Linklater's “Blue Moon” when Ethan Hawke's Lorenz Hart, three sheets to the wind at Sardi's, tries to explain why he stopped writing. He doesn't say he dried up. He says Broadway stopped being drunk enough to need him. The line lands like a glass set down too hard—cracked but unbroken.
Linklater, who has spent decades bending time into origami (Before Sunrise, Boyhood), here folds it into a single night: March 31, 1943. The night Oklahoma! opens. The night Richard Rodgers, Hart's partner of 24 years, unveils his first score with Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart is at the bar, not the theater. He is 47. He will be dead in eight months. The film never leaves the amber glow of that room, and it doesn't need to. The eclipse happening inside Hawke's face is the whole horizon.
This is the performance Hawke was born to play. He has always been our most literary screen actor—the one who looks like he just put down a difficult book. Here, he finds the rhythm of a man whose wit is a tic, a defense, a curse. Hart could out-rhyme anyone in Manhattan, but the movie's genius is showing how that gift became a cage. He is the last court jester of the old, louche, pre-war Broadway—the one where songs were cynical and love was a setup for a punchline. And Hammerstein, that earnest farmer of feeling, has plowed him under.
Andrew Scott plays Rodgers as a man who has already filed for divorce from nostalgia. He is not cruel. Worse: he is reasonable. When he tells Hart that "people want to believe in surrey fringes and corn," he says it with the gentle, murderous patience of a CEO letting go a brilliant head of R&D. The friction between them isn't shouting. It's the silence after Hart fires off a perfect, poison couplet and Rodgers simply nods, checks his watch, and orders another round of professionalism.
The film finds its soul, however, in Sarah Margaret Qualley's beautiful performance as Elizabeth Weiland. As the young student and aspiring actress caught in Hart's gravitational pull, Qualley provides the film's only source of genuine light. She navigates the role with a luminous, wide-eyed grace that never feels naive. Her scenes with Hawke are the film's most delicate; she serves as Hart's final tether to the world of the living, balancing her character's budding ambition with a profound, quiet empathy for a man she knows is already lost. Qualley's ability to hold the screen against Hawke's manic energy proves she is one of the most formidable talents of her generation.
Visually, the film is a trap. The cinematography coats every mirror and highball in the sepia of memory you cannot trust. Linklater loves the long take here, letting Hawke pace, ramble, retreat into himself. The second act does drift—intentionally, I think, into the blur of a man ordering the same drink and telling the same joke to a different face. But that drift will test you. It tested me. By the third act, though, the weight accumulates. You realize you have been watching a man drown in increments, and the water is his own wit.
“Blue Moon” is not a biopic. It's a wake. Linklater has made a film about the precise temperature at which genius becomes a liability—when the town stops wanting Blue Moon and starts wanting Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'. It is sad, wise, occasionally too patient with its own sorrow, and anchored by a Hawke performance that should be spoken of in the same breath as his Jesse or his Mason. The show goes on. But the song they play after you leave is the one he wrote. (Neo, 2026)
