I only know the song because the Cowboy Junkies did a cover
dir: Richard Linklater
2025
I never would have thought one of my favourite movies of 2025 would be a biopic about some short-arsed shmuck I’d never heard of, though I do of course recognise some of the songs mentioned. And I also never thought I’d see Ethan Hawke play an actual character as opposed to the same Ethan Hawke character he seems to play in everything from Reality Bites to The Black Phone movies. It’s important to remember that much of Hawke’s best works have been with this same director over the decades, whether it’s the Before trilogy with Julie Delpy or the great elongated experiment Boyhood.
It’s really a transformative performance, as in, you regularly / occasionally forget it’s Ethan Hawke playing this dapper, motor-mouthed, whiney, irritating, charming, delightful jerk called Lorenz Hart.
That might not be a household name anymore, but the songwriting duo of Rodgers and Hart was a formidable one, up until it was eclipsed by the far more famous and successful Rodgers and Hammerstein, what with their Oklahoma!s and their Kings and I and their Sounds of Music and whatnot.
Rodgers was the music composer, Hart the lyricist, but considering the movie begins with Hart’s death, and then jumps back several months to the opening night of the premiere of Oklahoma! on stage, we can surmise that there’s been some falling out between the duo, resulting in Rodgers and Hammerstein hooking up (professionally speaking).
Hart bails from the premiere overflowing with resentment and mockery. For the entirety of the flick he refers to that successful musical as “Oklahoma Exclamation Point” to show his utter contempt for its cornpone pandering, but we start to get the idea that it’s less his critical, unbiased judgement, and more his wounded pride that’s talking. He can’t believe that Rodgers has “left” him for Hammerstein, but still hopes to coax him back, somehow.
It’s his broken heart that we are witness to, for most of this flick’s duration, most of which transpires at the front bar of the legendary Sardi’s, as Hart waits for the premiere to end so he can start sucking up to Rodgers and his entourage. There’s a long time that passes before that happens, and Hart chatters ceaselessly throughout.
He’s mostly chatting to Eddie (Bobby Canavale), the barman, and Morty (Jonah Lees), who’s playing the piano, so he’s occasionally referred to as ‘Knuckles’ as well. And there’s a mysterious, quiet writer lurking in the background, writing down Hart’s witty bon mots, and it’s only later that we find out the chap is E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), famed author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, a writer who delighted in making readers fall in love with tiny characters.
I wonder what he plundered from Lorenz Hart’s endless prattle in order to imbue characters like Charlotte, Wilbur, Templeton or Stuart Little himself with pathos and relatability? The little beings, they deserve even more of our love and affection, just like stupid babies need the most attention.
For all his annoying ceaseless prattle and endless self-regard, he is, after all, like many of us, just desperate to be loved. And he believes in the transformative power of art and beauty, despite his cynicism, despite being endlessly rebuffed, and being a shameless drunk. We don’t see him drunk for the majority of the flick, because he has begged Eddie not to serve him (too much) booze at least until after he gets to talk and cajole Rodgers into coming back (to him). So it is a sober Hart that we are watching, not the one who is usually at the bottom of a bottle after a four day bender.
I think there’s no claim, no need, for this to be seen strictly speaking as something that actually happened, as in, I don’t think anyone’s pretending this is a depiction of an important night in Hart’s life before he died of alcoholism / pneumonia / a broken heart. I mean, there was a premiere for a musical, Hart did go to Sardi’s, he and Rodgers (Andrew Scott, perfect in this damning role as someone apologetic for ‘leaving’ Hart but who had sacrificed too much to put up with Hart’s drunken unreliability any longer) did chat and collaborate on new songs for a new production of The Connecticut Yankee, but sometimes clean breaks are best.
I don’t know if that moment where Lorenz Hart was introduced to a tiny “Stevie” Sondheim ever happened, but damn is that hilarious when the pre-teen tells Hart his work is sometimes sloppy.
Doubling up on the rejection, improbably, it feels, Hart also has contrived for a girl he thinks he’s wooing to come tonight, despite the fact that he’s 47, she’s 20, and he’s a shrunken gay Hebrew, and she’s a six-foot WASP shickseh (Margaret Qualley, who must be in every film that comes out these days). He thinks he’s in love, or at least that he’s in with some sort of mystical chance that he might… I dunno, have sex with her? It’s not entirely clear what the plan is, but at the very least, he’s longing for something, to be loved perhaps without being pitied, which isn’t really love at all.
It’s not like she’s using him in order to have an introduction to the coolest kids in town thanks to Oklahoma!’s success; she does seem to have some affection for this little troll of a comb-overed man. The film gives over its last fifteen or so minutes to her so that she can deliver her heartfelt take on her latest romantic goings-on, and really, with all the affection in the world, there’s nothing, we realise, for Hart to hold onto there. It’s really her youth and her passion that he craves, and those he can’t have, no matter what.
Ethan Hawke has been doing this acting thing since he was a child, and I will admit I’ve enjoyed his work in many flicks and not so much in others, but this here is genuinely transformative, and I’m not talking about his appearance. He genuinely embodies this character, and he dominates the flick but he is working with an accomplished cast that bounce off his energy and his endless bullshit. They’re not, especially Bobby Canavale, passively sitting there just to hear Hart talk about himself for the hundredth time. They mock him without cruelty to keep him grounded; they push back when he gets outlandish, they respect him but there’s pity there as well. They all might be going somewhere (Knuckles might be going off to war, eventually, since this is all happening well before the end of WWII), but there’s no notion that Hart has anywhere to go but down from here.
And he plays it as such without histrionics and without pandering to us. If we sympathise, that’s all well and good, he’s as entrancing a character as a storyteller even as his character explicitly is a storyteller, to whom every word, every form of punctuation, every element is vital. All his prattling aside, it’s his conversations with E.B. White where they’re trying to capture the exact word, the exact feeling of something, where we see two artists as they truly are (or at least would most hope they would be seen as), in thrall to the creative muse above all other selfish motivations.
There are heartbreaking moments for us to watch, but in a dry Golden Age of Hollywood sense, not in the heartfelt balling your eyes out sense, as we see Hart’s scenes with Rodgers, where we can see he won’t take him back, or Hart and Elizabeth being given the “love you, but not like that” line, and they’re all meant to emphasise that this film is about a funny little man who never got to be loved the way he needed, but then some things are not fated, and we get to carry on anyway, or, in Hart’s case, not for much longer. And that it is only through his own art, or other people's art, hence the amount of Casablanca that’s quoted, that artists like Hart can make sense of the world or their place in it.
I loved it, I thought it was a beautiful, poised, supremely well-made and acted flick, and it has just the right amount of whimsy and melancholy to sell itself as less a biopic and more a depiction of human yearning. It’s neither too schmaltzy nor too cynical, which is a perfect balance achieved, for my money.
9 times there are scenes where he looks like a Chihuahua and Elizabeth looks like a giraffe out of 10
--
“How do you know it's the same mouse?
- “Well, he certainly looks the same. He has that same New York look of doomed hopefulness.” - Blue Moon
- 100 reads