The director Richard Linklater is cinema’s reigning king of the chill hang, capable of mining compelling drama from the most blissed-out characters. So I was initially thrown by his choice of subjects for his two latest films, released back-to-back: a pair of real-life visionaries uninterested in following artistic conventions. But taken together, the movies demonstrate Linklater’s interest in probing creative temperaments, including his own. Like his protagonists, the filmmaker went against the grain at the start of his career. Now, in his late-middle age, a much more flexible Linklater is ruminating on other notorious artists.

The first of the films is Blue Moon, a sweet-and-sour portrait of the lyricist Lorenz Hart (played by Ethan Hawke) melting down at a bar near the tail end of his

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