In Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s fantasia on the life of Lorenz Hart, his frequent collaborator Ethan Hawke plays the famous Broadway lyricist. Slate recently ran photos of Hart and Hawke (in the film) side-by-side, and the resemblance is striking. The darkly good-looking Hart strikes a confident pose, so much so that it is difficult to believe how he lacked self-esteem, especially given his ebullient, outgoing personality. Director Joshua Logan called him “the most lovable, cuddly, honey bear.” Frances Manson, a story editor at Columbia Pictures to whom Hart proposed marriage, said she adored him. “He was so dynamic and energetic, his presence was so magnetic.” But looking a bit closer at the photo, it becomes clear what his longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers said about him when they first met: “Feature for feature he had a handsome face, but it was set in a head that was a bit too large for his body and gave him a slightly gnome-like appearance.”

At 4’10”, Hart was able to buy clothes in the boys department at Wanamaker’s; he wore elevator shoes (he called them his “two-inch liars”) and joked about his height, but being the smallest man in the room bothered him deeply. When asked by a reporter if he had a love life, he said he hadn’t any. Was he a confirmed bachelor? “Of course,” he said. “Nobody would want me.”

For the film, turning the 5’10” Hawke into the 4’10” Hart took digging trenches in the set, having actors stand on crates, and Hawke walking with his knees bent. It works—when Hawke stands next to Margaret Qualley, who is 5’8″, he only comes to her shoulders. And when he walks across the room, he appears to be only somewhat taller than the bar itself.

And a lot else works in Linklater’s film, comprised of a rigorous recreation of the opening night party for Oklahoma! at Sardi’s on March 31, 1943, to which he brings cinematic sensibility to Robert Kaplow’s talky script. It could easily have been a filmed stage play—the sort that guarantees its star a Tony come award season. Will the same occur for Hawke come Oscar time? Perhaps. He gives a delightful and empathetic performance, simultaneously wry and sad (a characteristic of Hart’s lyrics). No amount of drink dulls his realization that his partner and his new collaborator (Oscar Hammerstein II) are ushering in a new form of musical writing that makes his style obsolete. As Theresa Helburn, one of the Theatre Guild producers who brought Oklahoma! to Rodgers in 1942, put it: “I have always believed that it was seeing the play on opening night that broke his heart and hastened his death. Poor Larry, so warm and exuberant and sweet in spite of his underlying sadness. Larry, who was never quite in tune with life.”

That death would come the following November when, during one of his famous drinking binges, he was found in a cold November rain on Eighth Avenue. He had pneumonia, and nothing—not even the wonder drug penicillin, provided to him by Eleanor Roosevelt despite wartime shortages—could save him. His last words were said to be: “What have I lived for?”—a song title if there ever was one.

At the party, Hart was quoted as having told Rodgers: “This is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, and it’ll be playing twenty years from now!” Kaplow, though, shows a more ambivalent Hart, filled with venomous wisecracks at the expense of his collaborator’s success while aware of its appeal to wartime audiences. “Oklahoma!, with an exclamation point, no less,” he says drily, rolling his eyes. “It’s fraudulent on every other level down to the exclamation point in its title.” Adding later, “Any title that feels the need for an exclamation point, you want to steer clear of.” And he even rhymes his dislike: “a 14-carat hit and 14-carat piece of shit.”

But Hart has come to Sardi’s with more on his mind than congratulating Rodgers. He plans on meeting his protégée, 20-year-old Elizabeth Weiland (a radiant Margaret Qualley), a Yale graduate student he is crushing on. The two met when Weiland wrote Hart a fan letter, which evolved into what Hart called “a Larry Hart lyric,” meaning he had fallen for her “impossibly and illogically.” According to the letters, the pair went to Vermont for a weekend together, but no details were given of what transpired. In the film, Kaplow has Hart saying he made a pass at her in Vermont, but she gently rebuked him; Hart hopes that night she will not.

Though this invented narrative does feel out of place—another Hollywood gaywashing. Hart had been gaywashed once before, in 1948’s Words and Music, but nothing in that biopic is rooted in reality, nor could it allude to Hart’s being gay. But Blue Moon also cheats some, having Hart call himself an “omnisexual” for all of Sardi’s to hear. It’s a funny term to contemporary audiences, but it is doubtful he would joke about his sexuality in such a public place in 1943. Hart was queer, plain and simple, in a time when his only public acknowledgment were allusions in lyrics. Take, for instance, this one from “Where’s That Rainbow?”: “Where’s that Lothario?/Where does he roam with his dome Vaselined as can be?”

It was pretty much known in Broadway circles that Hart was queer, even Elizabeth Weiland gently questions him about it during a private meeting in the cloak room. In reality, Hart was secretive about his sex life. Hart biographer Gary Marmorstein speculated about the where and when of Larry’s encounters with other men in his 2013 biography A Ship Without a Sail. Were they in Turkish baths? A hideaway hotel room? He maintains that Hart preferred rough trade, going off to Miami or Mexico and enjoying himself with beach boys. Hart’s frequent collaborator George Balanchine reported to his assistant that on a trip the two men took together to London, he “got him out of brawls, when Larry would pick up sailors and get beat up.”

And Hart was also conscious of family pressure to marry. Once while he was playing the song “I Married an Angel,” his mother turned to one of his friends and said, “I wish my Larry would marry an angel.” In the film he says he recently proposed to Vivienne Segal, the musical star who found great success twice in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey, but she turned him down saying she loved him, just not in that way. Late in the film, Elizabeth repeats those words, and the look on Hawke’s face is devastating.

Blue Moon also avoids Hart’s Jewish identity—an erasure as glaring as its awkward handling of his queerness. Hawke plays Hart like a Columbia University professor on a bender—there is none of the colorful Native New Yorkerese essential to his personality. At one point, Hart praises Oklahoma! by comparing it to Abie’s Irish Rose, the popular hit about an Irish woman wanting to marry a Jewish man that was a huge success in the 1920s. “Only much more goyish, so it can tour.” Later, there’s a throwaway crack about Rodgers not knowing much about Maine, where Carousel was to be set: “He was bar mitzvahed, for Christ’s sake.” And that’s it. Two jokes. No context for what it meant to be a Jewish artist in 1943, navigating an industry where antisemitism was as endemic as homophobia.

Hart wasn’t just aware of his Jewishness—it shaped his entire worldview as an outsider. Along with Rodgers, Hammerstein, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern, Hart was part of the generation of Jewish composers and lyricists who essentially created the American musical because theater was one of the few bohemian spaces that welcomed people from the margins. His sense of being perpetually on the outside—too short, too gay, too Jewish—infused his lyrics with their characteristic melancholy and ironic wit.

By 1943, Hart was navigating being a closeted gay man, a Jew in an industry still rife with antisemitism, and someone whose physical disability made him feel fundamentally unlovable. The film wants the tortured artist without acknowledging the actual conditions that tortured him. Instead, we get Ethan Hawke—decidedly gentile in affect and appearance—pining after a fictional shiksa while cracking wise about exclamation points. It’s a sanitized portrait that strips Hart of the very identities that made his work so devastating and sophisticated.

At the core of the film is his professional breakup with Rodgers (Andrew Scott, excellent), who is both patient and short with him, often in the same sentence. To his credit, Kaplow does a terrific job of capsulizing their difficult relationship at this sensitive moment. Rodgers appears very aware of Hart’s frailties and approaches him with cautious grace, explaining how he wants them to work together on a revival of A Connecticut Yankee to write five new songs. Hart, though, wants more, and suggests a musical extravaganza “bigger than Jumbo” on the life of Marco Polo. Rodgers cites Hart’s chronic ghosting of appointments and deadlines, and how he was through with all that; and that he planned on working with Hammerstein again, this time on a musical adaptation of Liliom, which became Carousel.

Again, Kaplow conflates reality—that project was not discussed until after Oklahoma! opened—but it’s convenient for Kaplow’s narrative to emphasize how Hart was being pushed out. This device is common in biographical films, especially if it contains an underlying truth. In this case, Rodgers and Hart were pretty much over.

The film’s weakest bits indulge in awkward historical speculation, such as Hart suggesting to his drinking companion, New Yorker writer E.B. White, that he write about a middle-class mouse named Stuart—White would publish Stuart Little two years later. He encourages aspiring director George Hill to explore male friendship rather than romance—Hill would go on to direct Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And there’s a cameo by crime photographer Weegee, camera in hand, documenting the opening night festivities before he hit the streets to capture the latest grisly murder.

The film’s funniest moment comes when Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) clumsily approaches Hart to pay his respects and introduces him to his guest—13-year-old Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan), a musical theater whiz. The young Sondheim is far less impressed than his mentor with Hart, who makes the mistake of asking him what he thinks of his lyrics. “Funny, but sloppy,” the boy coldly replies. In truth, Sondheim was friendly with Hammerstein at that point in his life, but it is doubtful that he attended Oklahoma!‘s opening night as Hammerstein’s guest. Kaplow does fold in an accurate assessment of what Sondheim thought of Hart’s lyrics, though. He would later write that Hart was “the laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists.”

But are Linklater and Kaplow the laziest of film biographers by creating a Larry Hart who is witty and wounded, but is essentially a fictional character seeking redemption in the sexual conquest of a WASPy beauty? They convincingly make the 5’10” Ethan Hawke look a foot shorter and appropriately wizened from years of drink, but they never really get to the pain of the little man sneaking shots at Sardi’s bar. Instead we get a funny, gay clown—unhappy little boy blue. And watching this melding of truth and abundant fiction left me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

Blue Moon is currently in theaters. For more information, visit the Sony Pictures Classic website.

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