Throughout the course of Blue Moon—Richard Linklater’s new bittersweet Larry Hart biopic, which is now streaming on Netflix—several characters ask Ethan Hawke’s character, with varying levels of tact, whether the famed songwriter is gay.
Hart—a lyricist known for his work with composer Richard Rodgers (played in the movie by Andrew Scott)—asserts, several times, that he likes men, and he likes women, and he likes everything in between and beyond.
“Larry Hart is drunk with beauty, and italicize the word drunk,” Hart implores near the end of the film, after he realizes the woman (Margaret Qualley) that he’s madly in love with never saw him as a serious option. “Drunk with beauty, wherever he finds it, in men, in women, in the smell of cigar stores, in the impossible beauty of a 20-year-old poet, with pale green eyes and two tiny freckles on her left cheek.”
It’s not a simple answer, and therefore it’s an answer no one wants to hear. As played by Hawke, this version of Larry Hart refuses to streamline himself for the sake of others. It takes effort to see him as the full, nuanced person that he is, and people hate effort. But Hart demands the effort be made nonetheless, and that’s what makes him some of the best queer representation I’ve seen on screen in a long time.
As told by Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow, Blue Moon expands on a true story. We know that the real Hart made an appearance at Sardi’s restaurant to congratulate his collaborator, Richard Rodgers, on the opening night of Oklahoma!—aka the night it went from “Rodgers and Hart” to “Rodgers and Hammerstein,” after Rodgers’ first collaboration with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein was a smash hit. We also know that Hart exchanged letters with a 20-year-old college student named Elizabeth Weiland (played by Qualley), letters which screenwriter Robert Kaplow purchased from a used book seller.
“They suggest more than they say,” Kaplow said in an interview with USA Today. “She’ll write, ‘I had this disastrous 20th birthday party,’ or suggest that she and Hart went away for a weekend in Vermont, but she doesn’t actually say what happened. So that was fun to imagine that she’s got one perception of what their relationship is, and he erroneously has another.”
We don’t know for sure, however, if Hart was bisexual, gay, or queer in some way. “In 1943, you wouldn’t document that,” Kaplow explained in that same interview. “You’d get arrested. But apparently, the circle of friends he was with would suggest that [he had sex with men].”
Rather than portray him as a simply closeted homosexual, Blue Moon—drawing on the fact that the real Hart proposed, unsuccessfully, to both Broadway star Vivienne Segal and another actress—choose to embrace Hart’s contradictions.
As Hart, Hawke is equal parts rude and charming. He flirts shamelessly with the young flower delivery boy, insists on calling him Sven (his name is Troy) and insists on force-feeding him a shot, despite his protests. He’s pushy and relentless, and definitely inappropriate, and yet we see why Sven walks away from the interaction smiling.
His ego is nearly as powerful as his self-loathing. In one breath Hart will sing the praises of his own genius, comparing himself to Shakespeare, and in the next he’s wallowing in self-pity, lamenting that the skin on his back looks “like a white sheet someone had thrown up on.”
Hart is harshly judgemental, especially when it comes to the new “corn pone Americana” musical that Rodgers initially offered to him, but he turned down. He calls it a “14-karat hit and a 14-karat piece of shit.”
“I watched that show tonight and I felt this great sinking in my heart,” Hart says. “All around around me people are roaring at third-rate jokes. I wanted to grab the audience by the shoulders and scream, ‘What are you laughing at? Come on! Demand more!’”
Yet he fiercely defends Rodgers as a genius, and he does so with absolute sincerity. “There is no one with his range, his inventiveness—great, soaring masculine melodies building like pile drivers.”
Hart is undeniably self-centered. He’s a man who will talk to anyone that will listen, but these days, it seems few people will. in one affecting scene, the piano player (Jonah Lees), who’s been humoring Hart all night, quietly slips out of the bathroom while the lyricist is blathering on, quoting old reviews of his shows. It’s almost unbearable, his narcissism.
Yet we root for him anyhow. When the movie ends with Hart doing what he does best—storytelling—to his audience of three, we cheer. We want people to listen to him, even as we recognize his demand for an audience as a character flaw.
It’s because of all these many complexities and contradictions and flaws that make Hart such a refreshing queer character to watch. I’m tired of brave gays, strong gays, sassy gays, tragic gays. Which is not to say that Blue Moon‘s Larry Hart isn’t brave, strong, sassy, or tragic, because he is, in fact, all of those things, and more. It’s the fact that he is a full, complicated person. He could never be defined by his sexuality in the way that straight people wish he could be.
He has, as he puts it early in the movie, the chorus of the world inside him.
“To be a writer, you have to be kind of omni-sexual, don’t you? You have to have, inside yourself, everyone on earth—men, women, horses. How can you give voice to the whole chorus of the world, if the whole chorus of the world isn’t already inside you?”