Blue Moon

The first time I ever heard Blue Moon was as it echoed across the opening cinematic for Fallout: New Vegas. Sinatra crooned through a tinny radio as I was shown scenes of a once-charming, but now crumbling Las Vegas wasteland in the aftermath of nuclear war. It helped solidify it as a profoundly lonely song to me. Doesn't help that whenever it would randomly play on the in-game radio I was likely to be exploring some depopulated location by myself in the middle of the night alone with my PS3. Fifteen full years later, Richard Linklater decides to do the exact same thing. Lorenz Hart is stuck within the first six lines of his own biggest hit, waiting for somebody to appear before him. The only way to stop all of the darkness from fully creeping on up is to just. keep. talking. Hawke plays Hart with all the power and finality of a supernova. Always yapping about and around his true feelings with whichever scene partner's ear he can chew. Hauntingly effervescent, the sadness at the root of his character is bursting through every dramatic hand motion and quivering word. You begin to wonder through it all if everyone around him can see the heartbreak inside of him clear as day, or if it even registers at all; somehow it feels like both. Ethan Hawke clearly burns the brightest here, but the supporting cast all do a wonderful job bouncing off him, The standouts are Andrew Scott as Richard Rogers and Patrick Kennedy as EB White. Both men are quieter than Hart (albeit, not hard to do) and their performances are very heavily dependent on how they listen. Both use their faces and bodies in such a way that you don;t need to hear them speak to know how they think of Hart, and how he leaves his mark on them. Qualley is as magnetic as ever, plus she gets to deliver the most gut-wrenching line of the movie, and Cannavale gives us a quick breather between some of the more dense performances around him while still being extremely likeable and charming. The technical aspects here might be where this falls short for other people. It's effectively a stage play, mostly inside one space with little opportunity to play around with too many elements, but it all seems intentionally understated to allow Hawke to trapeze around. There's maybe a little too much wink wink references going on here for me (a specific mouse and little kid) but it's relatively minor. It's funny, when Fallout: New Vegas first came out, it set a Guinness world record for most lines of dialogue in a (single player) video game. It simply could not stop talking. Fifteen years later, in an entirely different medium, with an entirely different scale, I find myself feeling the same thing all over again.