Hollywood loves a biopic—that's nothing new. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Malcolm X, Truman Capote, and Ray Charles have gotten the treatment. But I bet you've heard of all those people, and probably even have a pretty good idea what they did with their lives.

But in recent years, Hollywood has looked to Broadway for the newest entry to the world of biopics, such as last year's Leonard Bernstein-focused Maestro. The newest Broadway legend to get a feature film treatment: lyricist Lorenz Hart, in the new film Blue Moon, out in movie theatres October 24.

As a Playbill reader, you're probably familiar with Hart. The same cannot be said of the public at large, denying the marketability of baked-in interest from just a title. But if non-theatre nerds might not know Larry Hart the man, it's pretty likely they've at least heard his work. Richard Rodgers, Hart's primary collaborator, is most famous today for his musicals written with Oscar Hammerstein II, like Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and Carousel. But the Rodgers and Hart songbook holds lots of true American standards: "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," "Isn't It Romantic?," "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," and "My Romance," to name but a scant few.

"This music's been with me for 40 years," says Richard Linklater, the film's director. "I discovered Rodgers and Hart in my 20s. It's funny—I was going to punk shows, and then going home and listening to the showtunes I grew up with." Linklater says Blue Moon didn't start with him, despite his affinity for Hart's work. It was the brainchild of screenwriter Robert Kaplow, whose novel, Me and Orson Welles, Linklater turned into another theatre-focused film in 2008. Blue Moon began as a screenplay that Kaplow sent to Linklater. "It was essentially a long monologue," Linklater remembers. "I was amazed. The feelings and the wit and the hurt—it was all in there."

For most, Hart is less of a household name these days, including for even some musical theatre fans, mostly because, with few exceptions, their musicals don't get performed much anymore. They come from a school of musical theatre that was much closely tied to the worlds of vaudeville and variety entertainments, which lots less emphasis on storytelling and dramaturgy than on pretty girls, funny jokes, and hit songs. For better or worse, that has made the Rodgers and Hart catalogue much more powerful today as just that—a collection of songs.

And that actually gets at why Hart proved to be a worthy subject for this biopic. "When Rick first sent this to me, I immediately felt like, oh I know this guy," says Ethan Hawke, who gives a tour-de-force (and physically unrecognizable) performance as Hart. "It made me want to read it out loud." At the time, Hawke was starring in a Broadway revival of Macbeth being directed by Jack O'Brien, who Hawke told about the screenplay. "I told him I'd read this amazing piece about Larry Hart going to the opening night party of Oklahoma!, and Jack said, 'That's the best idea I've heard in two decades.'" What better for a Broadway-themed biopic than a nice and passionate endorsement from a four-time Tony recipient?

If you're up on your musical theatre history, you probably know why the idea excited O'Brien so much. Opening night of Oklahoma! must have been a heady moment for Hart. The show was the first time Rodgers (portrayed onscreen by Fleabag's Andrew Scott) collaborated with another writer after he and Hart's long string of hits, and it was wildly different from what he wrote with Hart. Rodgers and Hammerstein had traded Hart's urbane wit and cynicism for something more earnest and corn-fed. But it was also a major, watershed moment in the history of musical theatre. Oklahoma! was revolutionary in many ways, becoming the first musical to successfully merge the worlds of theatre, opera, and dance; all of its elements were united towards plot development, a new concept for the world of musical theatre when it premiered in 1943. 

Oklahoma! was less focused on show girls and sequins than it was on its heroine's existential crisis and inner turmoil, on corn as high as a elephant's eye. It would become one of Broadway's biggest hits, amongst the first truly long-running juggernauts. And Rodgers did it with Hammerstein, not Hart. "I remember Jack [O'Brien] talking about why it had to be that night of all nights, right in the middle of the war, right when musical theatre is changing and becoming what Hammerstein wanted, what that transition meant," Hawke recalls. "He was like, 'That's a portrait of a death.'"

Rodgers had actually initially intended to write the musical that would become Oklahoma! with Hart, but he was uninterested in the subject material. Ironically, Hart is the one who suggested Rodgers link up with Hammerstein for the project, never dreaming he'd be losing his collaborator in the process. It didn't help that Hart was a notorious alcoholic who was reportedly very difficult and chaotic to work with. He was extremely diminutive (reportedly barely even five-feet tall, a trait that has been recreated on screen with the six-foot tall Hawke via some camera tricks and CGI), a closeted homosexual, and something of a tortured soul. 

Oklahoma! must have brought all of Hart's demons to the fore, and there really is no telling what he must have been feeling on that fateful opening night. 

It's also worth mentioning that O'Brien's calling it a portrait of a death is only partially metaphorical. Hart would die less than eight months after Oklahoma! opened in 1943, of a case of pneumonia precipitated by exposure from being outdoors too long on a cold, snowy Manhattan night of drinking. Jazz singer Mabel Mercer famously described Hart as "the saddest man I ever knew," a quote Linklater has wisely chosen to open Blue Moon with, before exploring the sadness that led to his tragic end.

Hart was actually at the opening of Oklahoma!, by the way, with his mother as Blue Moon depicts. But, Linklater shares, the rest of the film (which wholly takes place at Sardi's as the Oklahoma! crew celebrate opening night, anxiously awaiting what would turn out to be effusively glowing reviews) required some artistic license. Much of the film has Hart holding court separate from the party in the Sardi's downstairs, chatting with a friendly bartender (played by Art's Bobby Cannavale) and, in an imagined happenstance meeting, Charlotte's Web author E.B. White (played by Patrick Kennedy). "It's a bit of a heightened... I won't even use the word 'fantasy,' because it's very much based in reality," Linklater says. "But it's what it might be like, a fairy tale even."

And, spoiler alert: the film also includes another special easter egg cameo for Broadway fans. 

Kaplow and Linklater decided to depict Hammerstein being accompanied at the opening night party by a young Stephen Sondheim (played by Cillian Sullivan). Though Sondheim was indeed something of Hammerstein's musical theatre protégé, it's a little unlikely he would have been at opening night of Oklahoma!. But getting to show the later writer of Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods as a snooty 13-year-old was too enticing to pass up. 

It's a bit meta for Linklater too. He's in the midst of a 20-year process filming a movie version of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along that will capture its actors at the actual age of their characters over the multi-decade story, somewhat like his Boyhood (which also stars Hawke). Though the two knew each other and were working together on the Merrily film before Sondheim died in 2021, Linklater did not get to seek his blessing for the Blue Moon cameo.

"I was waiting to tell him, to know for sure the film was going to happen," he says. "I was looking forward to that moment, but I missed it by a year or two. I think he would have thought that was pretty funny."

But Blue Moon needn't be too worried about a fact check. The film is more a character study than a historical recreation. For that, Linklater and Hawke had maybe the best first-person source material possible: Hart's own body of work. Hawke says his favorite way of sitting with that was listening to what he calls "one of the greatest albums of all time," 1956's Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Song Book. "If I had to isolate a favorite, it would be 'Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered' [from Pal Joey]," Hawke shares. "It's just a masterpiece. It's a staggering accomplishment, maybe a page of lyrics that's better than some great novels."

"There's all this yearning and longing and left-behind, that other people are having the fun, normal life, this idea of being outside the glass looking in," adds Linklater wistfully. "That's all in his lyrics, all that pain. But there's a beauty. It's always moving. They're never self-pitying. They're carrying the weight of the world."

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Photos: Blue Moon Film Stills

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