Blue Moon: Waning

Blue Moon (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity and vulgarity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.26.25

Director Richard Linklater obviously loves the flow and rhythm of meticulously crafted dialogue, along with the challenge of a “talking heads” premise that involves very few characters, most memorably achieved in 1995’s Before Sunrise and its two sequels.

 

Lyricist Lorenz "Larry" Hart (Ethan Hawke) is foolishly besotted with the much younger
Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), who is kinder to him than he deserves.

He attempts the same with this biographical snapshot of a single evening in the ultimately tragic life of famed American lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart, who teamed with composer Richard Rodgers for 26 musicals during a collaborative relationship that lasted more than two decades in the early 20th century.

The result isn’t entirely successful, in part because it’s hard to endure the first half hour spent with this unpleasant, potty-mouthed narcissist, and also because it’s impossible to get beyond Ethan Hawke’s fake hair, and the trick shots employed to depict Hart’s shorter stature. Both are distracting.

 

That said, the film gets more interesting during its final hour, when the story expands to include several more characters equally adept at trenchant commentary and occasional bon mots.

 

Events take place during the late evening of March 31, 1943, following the debut of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (their first collaboration, and the first show the former created without Hart). The setting is the bar at the famed theater district restaurant Sardi’s, where the cast soon will gather, to await the reviews.

 

Production designer Susie Cullen and costume designer Consolata Boyle establish a persuasive sense of time and place.

 

Hart arrives first, having just watched the show. He pontificates to the mostly empty room, and also to Eddie (Bobby Cannavale, excellent as always), the tolerant, good-natured barman who will spend the next several hours trying not to serve drinks to Hart, who struggles with alcoholism. 

 

Hart’s stream-of-consciousness commentary is alternately witty, conceited, outrageously vulgar and self-deprecating. He waxes eloquent about the overall perfection of the 20-year-old Yale student with whom he’s currently smitten.

 

He also rails about the new play’s “corniness” and its clichéd presentation of old-fashioned American values, but — to paraphrase Shakespeare — the gentleman doth protest too much. It quickly becomes clear that Hart is both jealous and frightened: fully aware that he’s in danger of being replaced permanently.

 

(As we eventually learn, Rodgers was forced to write some of the final lyrics for their most recent collaboration, By Jupiter, because Hart’s alcoholism and terrible work ethic had become completely unmanageable.)

 

Frankly, these early scenes are quite tedious, because Hart is so unsympathetic and self-absorbed, and because he’s talking at Eddie, rather than chatting with him.

Mr. Holmes: Far from elementary

Mr. Holmes (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for disturbing images and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Some stage actors spend their entire careers hoping to play Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. When it comes to great literary characters, however, the ne plus ultra appears to be Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen, left) is delighted when his housekeeper's young son,
Roger (Milo Parker), expresses interest in the great detective's beloved hives of honeybees.
The boy, in turn, senses that sharing this hobby will help his much older friend forget, if
only for brief times, the unpleasant frustrations of advancing age.

How else to explain the scores of individuals who’ve taken a crack at the world’s most famous consulting detective? When Guinness World Records honored Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV, three years ago, he had been depicted 254 times by more than 75 actors.

That list now includes the venerable Ian McKellen, starring in director Bill Condon’s adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s 2005 Holmes pastiche, A Slight Trick of the Mind.

Arthur Conan Doyle purists may be dismayed by this handling of their beloved detective, for this is not the hard-charging rationalist depicted with authoritative panache by Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch and many others. McKellen instead gives us a frail, almost feeble Holmes, long removed from his illustrious career, vulnerable to the ravages of time, advanced age and self-doubt.

Condon’s film has an atmosphere of despondent finality about it: a tone similar to that employed by Richard Lester in 1976’s equally melancholy Robin and Marian, wherein Sean Connery’s exhausted and aging Robin Hood is poised at the similar precipice of mortality.

But even if this Holmes is a shadow of his former vigorous self, McKellen’s twinkling eyes and insightful gaze (at the detective’s better moments) remind us that the zealous pursuer of clues may be deeply buried within this dilapidated frame ... but he’s still there.

The time is 1947, and the 93-year-old Holmes is long retired, having moved to a quiet farmland home along the Sussex coast, in order to tend to his bees (as per Doyle’s projection of where the detective would wind up, late in life). Meals and other modest needs are handled by a live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), and her young son, Roger (Milo Parker).

Her husband, the boy’s father, was killed in the war.

Scripter Jeffrey Hatcher retains the structure of Cullin’s book, which cross-cuts between three narratives. The first and most extensive, set in the “present” of 1947, finds the increasingly lonely Holmes bonding with young Roger, who in turn admires the great detective as a father figure. Roger’s mother, all too aware of Holmes’ age, worries that this might not be advisable for a boy who already has lost his real father.