No matter what sort of partnership the two of you used to share, seeing your ex win is a major kick in the pants. Now imagine your former partner not only finds that great success with another person, but the two of them seem destined to become one of the most famous duos of all time. You would probably head straight for the bar.
That’s exactly what lyricist Lorenz Hart does on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the indelible musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Before there was Rodgers and Hammerstein, there was Rodgers and Hart, as the trailer for Richard Linklater‘s Blue Moon explains. “We write together for a quarter a century, and the first show he writes with someone else is gonna be the biggest hit he ever had. Am I bitter?” Hart (a bald-capped Ethan Hawke) asks a friendly bartender (Bobby Cannavale) before answering his own question: “Yes!”
Blue Moon takes place over the course of one night in Sardis, the legendary restaurant in New York’s theater district. As both Hart’s professional and private lives unravel, he encounters a new ingénue played by Margaret Qualley and must contend with his old partner, played by Andrew Scott. “By the time this night is over, Hart will have confronted both a world that no longer values his talent and the seeming impossibility of love,” the film’s logline reads.
Luckily, the partnership between Hawke and Linklater is still going strong. This is the ninth film the two have made together, including Boyhood and the Before trilogy. The two have teased that there could be a 10th film in the works, one that they’ve “been working on for a long time, and it seems like it’s finally ready,” as Hawke said at Blue Moon‘s Berlin Film Festival press conference earlier this year, per Variety. That one is still waiting on financing, but in the meantime, you can catch Hawke (and his bald cap) in Blue Moon in theaters in New York and L.A. October 17, or October 24 nationwide.
