Cinema

Blue Moon (2025): The Cost of Staying in the Room

Long before Blue Moon, I had become interested in what happens to songwriting partnerships once their period of effortless alignment has passed. Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy remains one of the most perceptive explorations of that dynamic, concerned less with the triumphs of Gilbert and Sullivan than with the strain of having to continue working together once inspiration has hardened into obligation. A similar preoccupation informed my own novel Debussy’s Slippers, which looks at the creative tensions between George and Ira Gershwin when George outgrew Broadway and yearned to be taken seriously as a composer. It is from that vantage point that Richard Linklater’s film feels less like a biographical exercise than a study in endurance.

Blue Moon is, on the surface, a modest proposition: a largely self-contained chamber piece in which Ethan Hawke occupies the frame for almost the entire running time, playing lyricist Lorenz Hart in the final stretch of his professional and emotional life. In practice, it is one of the most demanding central performances of Hawke’s career and a persuasive case for his Best Actor nomination. As with Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, the drama is less concerned with mythologising genius than with observing it at close quarters, under pressure. This is not a role built on transformation or theatrical display, but on sustained presence long after charm has curdled and wit has lost its protective power.

Hawke’s Hart is brittle, brilliant and exhausting, often within the same exchange. The performance resists easy sympathy even as it earns it. Hart is caustic, needy and self-aware to the point of paralysis, acutely conscious of having been left behind. What Hawke understands, and sustains with extraordinary control, is that Hart’s tragedy is not failure but continuation. He is still working, still talking, still returning to the language that once defined him, long after the partnership that gave those words their shape has shifted into something colder. That tension gives the film its shape, and Hawke carries it without relief.

Seen this way, Blue Moon feels less like a late-career flourish than the natural culmination of Hawke’s long collaboration with Linklater. Since his breakout in Dead Poets Society, Hawke has never stopped working across film, theatre and television, finding time to write novels alongside a career that has consistently favoured curiosity over consolidation. His partnership with Linklater, stretching from the Before Trilogy through to this point, has been defined by patience and trust, a shared belief that time itself can be the subject, rather than the enemy, of drama. Blue Moon distils that belief into its purest form.

By restricting itself almost entirely to a single location, Blue Moon sharpens its focus rather than narrowing it. The bar used for the afterparty following the opening night of Oklahoma! becomes a pressure chamber, denying Hart the usual escape routes of cinematic storytelling: montage, movement, or the softening passage of years. Time presses inwards instead. The resulting performance feels lived-in rather than sculpted, with Hawke allowing Hart to repeat himself, to circle the same grievances, to exhaust both those around him and, at times, the audience. This persistence is not indulgence. It is strategy. As in Me and Orson Welles, Linklater stages genius not in isolation but in proximity to those who will inherit it, revise it, or quietly move beyond it.

What emerges most clearly from that strategy is the cost of Hart’s brilliance. His gifts are inseparable from the repetition that sustains them, and from the inability to move on even when everyone else has. One small exchange in the bar captures this with particular elegance. Hart casually remarks that ‘weighty affairs will just have to wait’ to a room that includes Oscar Hammerstein and his young protégé Stephen Sondheim, a throwaway line that lands as a sly aside for theatre-literate viewers, all the more so given Sondheim’s later withering assessment of Hart in Finishing the Hat, his self-curated, lyric-by-lyric account of his own work.

That imbalance is reflected in Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Richard Rodgers. Scott is excellent, but his role is deliberately circumscribed. Rodgers appears calmer, more pragmatic, already half-absent. Where Hart fills the room with language, Rodgers withholds it. The film aligns us with Hart’s perspective, which inevitably means Rodgers feels reduced, even sidelined. This is less a slight on Scott’s performance than a reflection of the film’s emotional geometry. Blue Moon is not interested in balance. It is interested in what imbalance feels like from the inside.

Margaret Qualley, in a supporting turn, offers a telling counterpoint. She brings warmth and intelligence without sentimentality, a presence that highlights Hart’s constrained emotional economy. Qualley has developed a talent for grounding films that revolve around more volatile central performances, and she does so here with quiet assurance. Her scenes never compete for attention, but they subtly reframe Hart’s behaviour, allowing us to see both its allure and its cost.

Blue Moon also feels like a natural companion piece to Linklater’s earlier Me and Orson Welles, a film I reviewed when it was first released. That film was animated by the thrill of arrival: youth brushing up against genius, opportunity crackling in the air. It took place in rehearsal rooms and corridors alive with possibility, where collaboration was intoxicating and the future felt provisional. Blue Moon occupies the other end of that spectrum. Here, collaboration has already run its course. Genius is no longer something to be impressed by, but something to be lived with and outlasted.

Where Me and Orson Welles showed a young man learning how proximity to greatness might shape him, Blue Moon shows what it means to be the one left standing when that proximity fades. Linklater’s cinema has rarely been kinder, but it has always been honest. The difference between the two films is not subject matter but perspective: one looks forward, the other looks back, and the space between them is filled with compromise, resentment and endurance.

In that sense, Blue Moon may be Linklater’s most unsparing film. It offers no easy redemption, no late-life epiphany to soften Hart’s decline. What it offers instead is attention: sustained, uncomfortable and precise. Hawke’s performance deserves recognition not because it is showy, but because it refuses consolation. It understands that some partnerships define us not by how they end, but by how long we continue to speak their language after the conversation has moved on.

Cinema

Sister Wives (2024): When Intimacy Becomes Dissent

Sister Wives understands something many films about repression miss: the most dangerous thing in a closed system isn’t rebellion, it’s tenderness.

Set inside a fundamentalist polygamous marriage, the film follows Kaidence and Galilee, two women bound by ritual, hierarchy, and a husband who barely needs to exert control because the structure does it for him. Their days are defined by chores, obedience, and proximity, and it’s within that enforced intimacy that something quietly radical begins to form.

Louisa Connolly-Burnham directs with the precision of someone who knows exactly where the cracks are. No melodrama. No sermonising. Just glances held a beat too long, hands brushing while performing domestic rituals, and conversations that circle what cannot yet be named. The husband remains deliberately thin, less a character than a function, which sharpens the focus on the women and the emotional economy they are forced to share.

What’s most striking is how the film refuses the expected escape fantasy. There is no grand plan, no sudden awakening. Liberation emerges slowly as Kaidence and Galilee recognise that the connection between them offers something truer than the roles assigned to them. Intimacy becomes a form of dissent. Love, a quiet act of resistance.

Mia McKenna-Bruce gives Galilee a tightly wound vulnerability that makes every small choice feel seismic, while Connolly-Burnham’s Kaidence observes, absorbs, and eventually dares to respond. Both performances are restrained but deeply felt.

A short film that feels rigorously argued, emotionally intelligent, and quietly furious. No wasted frames. No false innocence.

Cinema

Song Sung Blue (2025): Love, Time, and the Cost of Compression

I went into Song Sung Blue already inclined to like it. I was something of a musical magpie from an early, impressionable age, discovering Neil Diamond through my father’s record collection; his taste was eclectic, ranging from jazz in all its forms to Mike Oldfield, with the occasional foray into classical. My enjoyment of Elvis came from my mother. Curiously, neither of them ever cared much for my favourite band, The Beatles, despite being of exactly the generation for whom that devotion might have seemed inevitable. In his opening monologue, Mike shares his unapologetic passion for simply good music. This film understands that instinctively. It is not interested in rescuing Diamond from irony or repackaging him for a new audience. It assumes affection, and trusts it.

The film’s dramatic credibility rests on performance. Kate Hudson’s Oscar-nominated turn is deserved precisely because it is measured rather than demonstrative. She plays Claire, Mike’s partner on and off stage, as someone whose emotional life is shaped by watching, adjusting, and accommodating. Her work accumulates quietly. Meaning emerges in reaction rather than assertion, through a steady attentiveness to the people around her.

Hugh Jackman’s Mike operates on a very different register. He is loud, charismatic, and unapologetically performative, deliberately so. Long before Neil Diamond enters the picture, Mike already considers himself a fully fledged original as Lightning, frustrated by a sense of unrealised promise. The move into the tribute circuit is less a creative calling than a concession to audience demand and bookers’ tastes. That frustration animates Jackman’s performance. His Diamond is not an impersonation but an interpretation, filtered through years of performing as Lightning and shaped by ego, showmanship, and a refusal to disappear.

Claire’s emergence as Thunder is crucial here. Despite being a gifted singer in her own right, particularly of Patsy Cline songs, she consciously positions herself in support of Mike’s vision rather than in competition with it. Hudson plays this not as self-erasure but as creative alignment. Jackman’s performance is expansive rather than restrained, but it is no less controlled for that. The volume is intentional; the charisma is a tool. Together, the performances mirror the relationship at the film’s centre. Claire stabilises and sustains. Mike projects and propels. Neither works without the other.

Structurally, Craig Brewer’s film is braver than it first appears. Lightning & Thunder were a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute act from Milwaukee, whose appeal lay less in mimicry than in the way performance and private life blurred, a dynamic captured in the quietly intimate 2008 documentary of the same name. Brewer leans into that intimacy in the film’s first half, which is warm, funny, and buoyant, and necessarily so. The humour is not incidental; it earns the audience’s trust. When the second act darkens, the shift can feel abrupt, even unsettling. Yet that disorientation is the point. Life does not announce its turning points neatly.

One of the film’s great pleasures is its attention to musical detail. Even in impromptu rehearsal settings, the staging feels lived-in rather than presented: microphone placement, breath control, missed cues, laughter bleeding into lyrics. These moments are allowed to remain imperfect. The music is not mythologised. It is inhabited. That authenticity pays off later, when the emotional meaning of the songs changes without needing to be underlined.

Claire and Mike’s daughters from previous relationships are quietly effective figures. They are not written as generational commentators or tonal correctives. Instead, they bring a modern sensibility through behaviour rather than dialogue. Rachel, navigating an unexpected pregnancy, is emotionally perceptive without being cynical. So is Angelina, whose concern for her father lingers despite 20+ years of his sobriety. Their presence prevents the film from slipping into cosy nostalgia, allowing the past to be gently observed and, at times, quietly questioned.

My one significant reservation concerns the film’s handling of time. The narrative is heavily compressed, and that compression is never fully resolved visually. None of the leads visibly age, nor do their children. As a result, a relationship that spans nearly two decades in reality plays on screen like a brief, intense chapter. Mike and Claire met in 1987 and married in 1994; Mike did not die until 2006. In the film, it feels closer to two or three years.

This matters because the film’s emotional core is not music, but partnership. Lightning & Thunder is not just a catchy stage name; it is a working arrangement, sustained over time. Lightning needs momentum, amplification, and belief. Thunder needs patience, grounding, and endurance. Those roles only gain emotional weight through repetition, through years of adjustment and recalibration. Without a felt passage of time, the audience understands the dynamic, but never quite experiences its cumulative cost.

The film understands this idea thematically. Mike’s insistence on opening the act with Suleiman is a declaration of artistic fidelity, a refusal to let the tribute slide into impersonation. It is also a quiet resistance to the easy comfort of Neil Diamond as anthem, resolutely downplaying the overuse of Sweet Caroline in favour of something more personal. Claire’s choice to support that vision rather than foreground her own considerable talent operates on the same principle. But repetition only becomes sacrifice when time is allowed to accrue beneath it.

Ironically, the film already has the tools it needs: shifting domestic spaces, evolving musical habits, children growing into different emotional roles. A little more visual signposting, a little more willingness to let years register, would not have diluted the intimacy. It would have deepened it, allowing the Lightning & Thunder dynamic to feel not just vivid, but weathered.

That partnership ultimately carries them further than either ever imagined. At the height of their popularity, Lightning & Thunder find themselves opening for Pearl Jam, an unlikely but quietly perfect cultural overlap. When Mike admits his nerves, Eddie Vedder puts him at ease with a simple line that lands as the film’s unspoken thesis: “Who doesn’t like Neil Diamond.” It is generous, uncomplicated, and true. In the end, Song Sung Blue understands this better than anything else. Not irony, not reinvention, but the endurance of music and love that people return to, time and again.

Cinema

Rewatching Hello, Dolly! (1969): A Misunderstood Roadshow Gem

On my recent rewatch of Hello, Dolly! I was struck by how much more alive and charming it feels than its reputation suggests. For years it has been filed away as the bloated late sixties roadshow musical that appeared just as Hollywood was pivoting towards the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. Yet time has been much kinder to it than that old “expensive flop” narrative would have you believe. Seen now, it is witty, exuberant and full of handmade spectacle. The Harmonia Gardens sequence in particular remains a small marvel of staging, movement and sheer visual glamour.

One of the unexpected pleasures of watching it again is Tommy Tune’s strange, wide eyed performance as Ambrose Kemper. What reads today as camp mugging was very much in line with director Gene Kelly’s idea of a heightened, vaudeville inflected Yonkers. Tune’s elastic physicality plays beautifully against Walter Matthau’s granite deadpan and Barbra Streisand’s star presence. Kelly clearly encouraged this approach. He wanted bodies, rhythm and joy to carry the comedy rather than dry one liners.

The casting of Streisand is still the most debated aspect of the film. At 26 she was obviously far too young to be playing Dolly Levi, a character written as a worldly widow who has lived and schemed and lost. From the studio point of view, though, it was simple. After the success of The Sound of Music and West Side Story, Fox wanted another prestige musical with a bankable star at its centre, and Barbra Streisand was the hottest property in America. On paper it looks like a mistake. On screen it is more complicated. Her voice is astonishing, the charisma undeniable and by the time she descends the staircase in Harmonia Gardens the age mismatch matters less than the sheer force of the performance.

The real author of the film is arguably not Kelly at all but Ernest Lehman. The opening credit that reads “Ernest Lehman’s Production of…” is not a polite flourish. It is a statement of control. Lehman had adapted and produced West Side Story and The Sound of Music and was seen as the safe pair of hands who could turn a Broadway hit into a glossy roadshow event. He shaped the script, the scale and the overall tone. Kelly was brought in once that package was largely in place. What we end up with is an unusual blend of producer driven spectacle and choreographic wit, rather than a pure Kelly musical.

If the film has a genuine technical flaw it is in the lip syncing, particularly in the slower songs. Streisand sings with studio perfection and very little visible physical effort, which creates small mismatches in close up that are hard to unsee once you notice them. It is the one thing that occasionally pulls you out of the moment. The faster numbers, which Kelly edits and choreographs with a dancer’s sense of rhythm, hide the joins far better. In those sequences picture and sound feel completely in step.

What struck me most on this rewatch, though, was how pleasant the whole film is to sit with. Matthau provides just enough vinegar to keep the syrup from becoming cloying, Michael Crawford, Danny Lockin and Tommy Tune bring a springy innocence, and the ensemble scenes burst with colour and good humour. The sincerity that once seemed hopelessly old fashioned now feels almost radical. In an era that prizes irony, there is something refreshing about a film that believes so wholeheartedly in parades, staircases and romantic new beginnings.

The WALL·E connection has helped too. Pixar’s decision to weave “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” through the circuitry of that little robot effectively reframed Hello, Dolly! as a romantic artefact of lost humanism. For many younger viewers this is now the film that WALL·E loves, rather than a failed Fox roadshow. It makes Fox and now Disney’s reluctance to give it a full 4K restoration feel like a missed opportunity. The 65mm photography, the sets and the costumes are crying out for proper high resolution treatment, ideally at the hands of the Criterion Collection, who could encourage a more serious reassessment.

More than fifty years after its debut, Hello, Dolly! no longer feels like a lumbering dinosaur. It plays instead as the last great toast of old Hollywood exuberance. Whatever its flaws, it closes the roadshow era not with embarrassment but with a brass band, a staircase and a wink.

Cinema

Mr. Nice

The rights to make a film of Mr. Nice were sold to the BBC by Howard Marks when the landmark autobiography of perhaps the most sophisticated drug baron of all time topped the best seller lists in 1996. 15 years later, his vivid memoir was finally brought to the big screen by the iconic writer/director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Immortal Beloved) who faithfully captures the rambling, often comic, nature of the original book, aided by an outstanding performance from Rhys Ifans in the title role.

In researching this article I have found many prominent discrepancies between the reported facts, their fictionalised account in the original Marks book and the way in which they are presented by Rose in his screenplay. This opaque concept of reality has helped to give “Mr. Nice” his legendary outlaw status with comparisons drawn to Robin Hood and Butch Cassidy to name but two. Whilst this lack of absolute veracity might irritate some, to my mind it only serves to heighten the movie as a work of art in its own right.

In trying to echo the essence of an autobiography, Bernard Rose elected to take on most of the important technical roles behind the camera, not content with writing the script and directing the performances. He is also the cinematographer (operating a handheld 35mm camera to capture the requisite period look) as well as being the film’s editor. This singular vision provides a necessary counterpoint to the force of nature, that is Rhys Ifans which dominates almost every scene in the movie.

Ifans actually got to know Marks back in the day when he was singing with the fledgling Welsh psychedelic rock combo Super Furry Animals. Prior to the huge success of the book, the two became firm friends and a deal was struck that Rhys should play Howard if a film was ever made of his life. This long-standing amicable association provides the movie with a heart that would have most likely been missing with anyone else in the lead role. Ifan’s admiration for Marks is demonstrable, as is his compassion, particularly in the Terre Haute Penitentiary scenes.

The film opens from behind theatrical curtains with Howard Marks addressing a favourable crowd during one of his live shows. After the book’s success, he became a popular speaker on the raconteur circuit. It then flashes back to his early life in a small Welsh coal-mining village near Bridgend. The black and white film stock shrinks to a 4:3 ratio, giving the feeling of a kitchen sink drama of the period. The young Howard is also played by Rhys Ifans; a surreal device recollecting the televised plays of Dennis Potter.

Marks was the first of his family to attend university after earning a scholarship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, in the mid-1960s. Like many of his generation during his undergraduate years, he was exposed to a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD, but his drug of choice was cannabis, in particular hashish, as he takes his first toke the scope of the picture widens and dramatically shifts from monochrome to vivid colour, reminiscent of Dorothy’s entrance into Oz.

After Howard graduates from Oxford with a degree in Nuclear Physics, he heads back to Wales, gets married and starts a family. This is the version of events unique to Rose’s film, as this is not how Marks recalls it in his book nor is it true to documented accounts them but it makes perfect dramatic sense. He takes a steady teaching job to make ends meet and, for a while, leads a sober yet boring existence, until he attends a party thrown by his old college chum Graham (Jack Huston), who seems to be doing incredibly well for himself by selling hash. Howard is readily seduced back into the hippy culture when he meets and shares a joint with Judy (Chloë Sevigny), embarking on a long love affair with her and the weed.

When Graham is arrested while attempting to smuggle a large haul out of Germany, Howard agrees to courier the remaining stash back to the UK, where he is quickly baptised into the machinations of big-time drug dealing, turning a quick profit and agreeing to collect further shipments from the Pakistani supplier, Saleem Malik (Omid Djalili). This whirlwind period in Howard’s life brings him into contact with the colourful character of Jim McCann, the Irish freedom fighter allegedly kicked out of the IRA for drug trafficking, played full tilt by David Thewlis. Marks engages McCann’s Provo contacts at Shannon Airport to covertly import drugs from the European mainland.

In a surreal twist straight out of the pages of Ian Fleming or John le Carré, Howard is approached by another old chum from Baillol, Hamilton “Mac” McMillan, played by the wonderful Christian McKay (Me and Orson Welles), who now works for MI6 and wishes to recruit Marks as his eyes and ears in various cases relating to narcotics or terrorism in return for a level of protection from the law.

Between the late 70s and early 80s, Howard Marks amassed a complex network of connections controlling, at one point 10% of the global hashish market, and by the mid-80s he had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines, and 25 companies trading throughout the world. True to the book, the film tries to suggest that his fateful decision to move into the American market was his ultimate undoing and that Judy, who by this time he had 3 children with, tried to discourage the US expansion and pull Howard back to reality and the commitment of family life, but the temptation to make even greater piles of cash proved too much.

Bernard Rose employs a clever stylistic device to convey the 25-year time period covered in the course of the movie. He takes actual filmed stock footage backgrounds and then digitally superimposes Marks over the top, matching the grain, whilst the effect is an obvious artifice dismissed by some critics as simply amateurish and cheap it actually serves as a striking visual quirk that reflects Howard’s constant state of expanded consciousness.  It also reminds me of the back projection shots favoured by Alfred Hitchcock in his golden Hollywood period, notably Marnie in 1964.

The original soundtrack by minimalist composer Philip Glass amounts to nothing more than incidental mood music echoing the sort of thing he did for the Errol Morris documentaries of the 80s starting with The Thin Blue Line. Nevertheless, it does help to bring about a sense of cohesion to the piece. For this level of attentive detail Rose should be commended. He has managed to make a visually unique movie and a wonderful star vehicle for Rhys Ifans out of a stoned shaggy dog story that will help maintain Howard Marks’ mythic stature as he continues his vigorous campaign for the legalisation of recreational drugs.