New York Film Festival 2025 - First Dispatch

I don't feel comfortable pronouncing on the 63rd New York Film Festival or what it said about the State of Cinema overall given that I saw only nine of the over 100 titles programmed. All I will attest to is my inability to catch a single masterpiece for the second year in a row, a function of time, money, and sticking to directors/subjects I like best. Perhaps next year I'll be reckless enough to choose something outside of my wheelhouse. Or else stick with experimental films, the jazz of cinema - always there, taken for granted, and capable of dazzling you with its risky changes when you deign to check in again. 

Starting with the most infuriating film, I experienced unwelcome déjà vu with one of Richard Linklater's two biopics screening at the festival - Blue Moon, about the Great American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart (Nouvelle Vague, the other, concerns Godard and the making of Breathless). Taking place almost entirely on March 31, 1943, the evening Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opened, Blue Moon finds Hart (Ethan Hawke) leaving the show at intermission and hieing to Sardi's where he proceeds to get soused and rue the success of his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). For the first half of the film, he holds court in the near-empty bar, swirling vapors of wit and sass around bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy) writing unobtrusively on the sidelines. Then a triumphant Rodgers and his entourage arrive and Hart puts on a pathetic display trying to rekindle the songwriting spark with Rodgers and introducing him to an ingenue with whom he is inexplicably obsessed, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an apparently real person who remains a nullity by film's end. 

Writer Robert Kaplow based his screenplay on letters Hart and Weiland wrote one another instead of the most recent biography, Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart (Simon & Schuster, 2012) which imparts a certain documentary value to the undertaking. We ought to embrace such deep dives into the relationships between women and bisexual men (or however we are to ascribe the morass made of sexual identity by the era). But no film is an island and Blue Moon joins De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004) and the disastrous Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023) as yet another nervous attempt to center the heterosexual relationships of queer composers (Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein in the latter two instances). One need only peep the panicky poster art of each assuring Mr. and Mrs. Popcorn that no deviant sexuality will cross their screens today. Will we not get biopics of Sondheim (who shows up here at 13 years old in a cameo played by Cillian Sullivan), Ebb and Kander, or Ned Rorem because they never married women?

In partial compensation, the performances are uniformly sparkling, especially Hawke who should be a shoo-in for an Oscar nod. And Linklater ventilates his recreation of Sardi's, shot in Dublin, by letting the camera rummage through the bathroom, climb atop the staircase, sneak into the cloak room. The latter location, though, is the setting for a dreary tête-à-tête in which Weiland recounts a recent sexual exploit to Hart with nary a suggestion of how such spaces informed the creation of Hart anti-valentines like "It Never Entered My Mind, "Glad To Be Unhappy," and "Blue Moon" itself. You're better off watching the greatest film of the century instead. 

Grade: B-minus