Standing Alone

On Richard Linklater's Blue Moon

You couldn’t escape them the way you could a movie: their songs, all those hymns to radiant normality, all that self-willing cheeriness, came at you from every direction . . . Living in fifties America . . . was like living in a public absence: like a public space that’s suddenly emptied out, a theatre after closing, or a classroom after school. The emptiness could feel liberating, but it could also make you feel blank and vaguely nostalgic.

That’s film historian James Harvey in his superb book Movie Love in the Fifties talking about how Rodgers and Hammerstein embodied the false, cheery boosterism of the American fifties. In Richard Linklater’s melancholy stinger of a picture Blue Moon it’s only 1943, March 31 to be exact, but that falsity is already creeping in. It’s Broadway opening night for Oklahoma!, that paean to an America that never was and the first of the collaborations that would make Rodgers and Hammerstein the most successful writing team in the history of musical theater. And not everyone is celebrating.

At Sardi’s, the Times Square theatrical watering hole where the company is coming to wait for the reviews, Richard Rodgers’ former writing partner, the lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), has settled himself in at the bar before anyone else arrives. Hart couldn’t wait for the ecstatic ovation he could see coming and beat it out of the St. James theater. To Hart what he’s just seen is a huge pile of cornpone, populated by supposedly recognizable types no one has ever encountered in real life. The screenwriter Robert Kaplow uses this upscale New York saloon as the stage on which Hart, with people floating in and out, will give a grand performance that verges from the witty to the mean and masochistic, modulating his remarks and his manner to suit the particular audience before him, but finally incapable of not telling, even inadvertently, the truth.

Hart doesn’t hesitate to let his buddy Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) know just what he thinks of Oklahoma! in a string of withering remarks (my favorite being who the hell names the hero of a musical Curly?). And how can you blame him? Who in his right mind would expect the man who wrote “My Funny Valentine,” “Manhattan,” “Isn’t it Romantic?,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “I Could Write a Book,” “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and so many more, all those songs of casual, throwaway wit barely disguising the most exquisite and suave heartbreak, to endure the likes of “Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry”? (We can only imagine to what heights of invective the horror of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” would have inspired Hart.)