Ethan Hawke Talks His Oscar-Worthy Performance in ‘Blue Moon’

Ethan Hawke has been making movies for four decades, and yet he’s never been better than he is in Blue Moon.

A complex character study about Lorenz Hart, whose twenty-five year partnership with Richard Rodgers resulted in some of the 20th-century’s most memorable musical-theater hits (“Blue Moon,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine”), the actor’s ninth collaboration with director Richard Linklater is as multifaceted as its subject and his songs, at once joyous and sad, intelligent and playful, theatrical and cinematic.

Set over the course of a single evening at New York’s legendary Sardi’s, during which Lorenz is forced to contend with the opening-night success of Rodgers and new partner Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, it’s a love letter to a bygone Broadway era and to a complic