Both of Richard Linklater’s films released in 2025 deal with critical inception points in 20^th century culture. Nouvelle Vague is a period piece about the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which kicked off the French New Wave and a new post-war cinematic sensibility. Written by Robert Kaplow, Blue Moon jumps a few decades back, to the 1943 opening night of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma!, which ushered in a new era for the American musical. However, we only get a brief glimpse of the musical itself, since the film plays out in Sardini’s restaurant bar, where the cast and crew gradually gather after the show. All of this is mediated through the perspective of Lorenz Hart, Rodgers’ former lyricist, played by Ethan Hawke. While Rodgers and Hart wrote many successful musicals during the 1920s and 1930s, most notably Pal Joey, by the early 40s Hart’s alcoholism had rendered their partnership untenable, at least in Rodgers’ eyes. The immediate success of Oklahoma! is therefore a bittersweet experience for Hart, who alternates between excoriating the musical and begging Rodgers, played by Andrew Scott, to take him back. In essence, Blue Moon plays as a punctuated monologue from Hart, as he reflects on his career, his life and the state of American culture, all while the bar gradually fills around him with the laudatory Oklahoma! crowd. That deep-focus rhythm of the bar gradually coming to life while Hart remains sidelined in his own private world prevents a very wordy script – Hart is, after all, a frustrated lyricist – from ever feeling theatrical, or like a filmed play, as does Linklater’s Lethean evocation of the bar as a space where past and present mingle, a zone of existential reckonining, not unlike the dives of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend.

There’s a powerful contrast, then, between the smallness of Hart’s world and the scale of Oklahoma!, which is transforming the world of American spectacle across the road as he stares into his glass and convolutes into one anecdote after another for the few people who will listen – bartender Eddie, played by Bobby Cannavale, pianist Morty Rifkin, played by Jonah Lees, the essayist E.B. White, played by Patrick Kennedy, and aspiring actor Elizabeth Weiland, played by Margaret Qualley, whose epistolary exchanges with Hart formed the basis of Kaplow’s screenplay. The central moment of the film occurs when Rodgers and Hart are photographed together by Weegee, played by John Doran, in what feels like a divergence point for both American masculinity and musical theatre. We see this shift first and foremost in the difference between Rodgers and Hart’s two public personae. On the one hand, Rodgers has a wife and two children and is a model of sobriety and responsibility. On the other hand, Hart is bisexual, unmarried, alcoholic and overtly Jewish, unlike Rodgers, who has subsumed his Jewishness into a more acceptable Waspish image, at least within the world of Kaplow’s screenplay. As one news article puts it, “one goes to bed at 4:30 every morning, one never dissipates,” and it is Hart’s dissipation that makes him unsuitable for Rodgers, not only as a professional partner, but as a mouthpiece for the values on display in Oklahoma!. Indeed, it feels like Hart’s only legitimate public social bond was with Rodgers – with the partnership dissolved, he occupies an abjectly marginal place in New York society.

This difference in disposition crystallises around the aesthetic and ideology of Oklahoma!, which critics are already describing as the “most thoroughly and attractively American musical since Show Boat.” Hart doesn’t necessarily disagree but he remains sceptical about its messaging, damning it with faint praise when he describes its “great soaring masculine melodies, like piledrivers.” Like the consolidation of the Hays Code that was occurring in cinema at the same time, Oklahoma! represents, in Hart’s mind, a new era of “seriousness” and sententiousness in the musical theatre, even as the content becomes more overtly perverse, whether it is the fantasy of “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No” or the suicide-baiting of “Poor Judd is Dead.” By contrast, Hart understands his own career as lyricist as promulgating a distinctly American lexicon that refrains from this kind of bloviated heroic Americana, and Hammerstein testifies to this element of his voice too: “You made American songs sound like American speech.” In the shadow cast by Oklahoma!, Pal Joey suddenly seems immoral, decadent, irresponsible – one critic described it as “good if the audience could park their morals in the lobby” – but Hart feels that a new kind of perversion hides in plain sight in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s vision, a sanitised and sugarcoated brutalism.

No doubt that’s a somewhat uncharitable reading of Oklahoma! but there is something compelling and prophetic about the way Hart positions it as the beginning of a new period of normative mainstream spectacle – a new evolution of mass media, designed to produce mass consensus. As Hart and pianist Morty slink in and out of Hart’s body of work, you sense a shift from the model of the Great American Songbook, which often emerged from musicals but also existed as its own body of work, to the “Musical” as a hermetic superspectacle that needs no other point of reference but itself. Hart is also prophetic in the significance he places on this earlier continuum between musical numbers and the American Songbook; none of the songs in Oklahoma! could have been said to take on a life of their own in the same way as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When” or indeed “Blue Moon.” Hart explains this by insisting that Oklahoma! is ultimately designed to be “inoffensive” above all else in its “nostalgia for something that never existed,” which of course makes it an ideal vehicle for jingoism (more than one reviewer suggest that Oklahoma adopt the title number as their state song). In the world of the film, Rodgers’ new direction lays the groundwork for a heroic mid-century masculinity that Hart – short, effeminate, “ambisexual” – will never be able to inhabit.

By contrast, Hart envisages that his next (or last) musical will be a comic riff on Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series – a deconstruction of the patriotic Americana that Rodgers has embraced in Oklahoma! Hart tends to be framed as old-fashioned or irrelevant by his peers but in some ways he’s ahead of his time in his vision of the musical as a vehicle for the high concept stylings of, say, Stephen Sondheim, who makes a brief appearance as a young theatre fan. In fact, some of Hart’s other proposed musicals anticipate Sondheim. He plans a lavish fin-de-siecle spectacle along the lines of A Little Night Music, which he believes is totally unsuited to Hammerstein’s lyrical style: “What does Oscar know about turn-of-the-century Budapest? He’s gonna Americanise it…set it in Maine.” Likewise, he presages Merrily We Roll Along in his warning to “Be careful of love stories. Think of friendship stories. That’s where the really enduring stuff lies.” As Rodgers’ and Hart’s manifestos for musical theatre diverge over the course of the night, their dialogue becomes more cutting – Hart tells Rodgers he’s starting to sound like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Rodgers reflects that “I think each serviceman in that audience thought for a moment about what we were fighting for,” to which Hart responds sardonically “Girls in gingham who can’t say no?”

By the end of the film Rodgers and Hart have passed the point of no return, which is to say that Rodgers belongs in this world that he is actively constructing and Hart has no place without Rodgers to legitimate him. Like the depiction of Truman Capote in Ryan Murphy’s Feud, this is a mid-centuty vision of the queer man as valuable only insofar as he is proficient, entertaining or useful, but without being granted an inherent dignity on his own terms. For all the apparent empathy of Hart’s captive audience, they all leave him as soon as they have got something from him. E.B. White proves an attentive listener for a while, not least because the role of the professional essayist seems to be suffering the same fate as that of the incidental lyricist, overwhelmed by a world of mass-produced superspectacles. Yet the moment Hart speculates on the idea of a talking mouse, he returns from the bathroom to find that White has left him to start writing on his magnum opus, Stuart Little. Likewise, while Hart extols Weiland as “the best listener I ever met,” and showers her with lavish affirmations of friendship that she initially she seems to reciprocate, she discards him immediately for Rodgers, making it seem like she always saw Hart as a mere stepping stone.

This ushers in the haunting ending, in which Weiland abruptly shifts her focus from Hart to Rodgers, who instantly hones in on her desire, invites her to his party, and leaves Hart at the bar with the most token of invitations. Whereas Hart has spent much of the film talking around his lasvicious desires, Rodgers acts instantly on his, but he manages to hid in plain sight beneath his socially sanctioned persona, much as the jingoistic sheen of Oklahoma! gives him license for some of the most perverse sentiments of his career. Of course, Rodgers was a genius, his collaborations with Hammerstein were really incredible, and this is just one version of his life, but it’s not hard to hear a whole universe in Hart’s final pointed question about whether Rodgers’ wife will also be at the party that Weiland is attending – a universe where personal and artistic longevity depends upon inhabiting what Judith Butler described as “bodies that matter” (and Hart would die a mere eight months late from pneumonia after a drinking binge). Linklater’s film therefore speaks eloquently to an America that is in the midst of its own Oklahoma!-like moment, a Trumpean pageantry of perverse nostalgia; when Trump enjoins us to “Make America Great Again,” it’s not hard to believe he has something like Oklahoma! in mind. Yet in the closing moments of Blue Moon, when the theatre crowd have departed, the workers in the bar – bartender, pianist, cigarette girl, coat check girl – are still humming Hart’s tunes, which, after nearly a century, endure, persist, linger, live on, as testaments to a different, more optimistic, “America.”