Blue Moon review: Ethan Hawke is unrecognizable and transfixing in sad, witty Broadway tale

Running time: 100 minutes.Rated R (language and sexual references).

In theaters.If when you hear the words “Pal Joey,” you think fondly of your friend Joseph, Richard Linklater’s new film “Blue Moon” might leave you bothered and bewildered.As for Broadway buffs and lovers of old New York, the witty, hilarious and haunting movie starring a totally transformed Ethan Hawke as musical-theater lyricist Lorenz Hart will have them utterly bewitched.“Do you ever think of your entire life as a play?” Bobby Cannavale’s all-ears Sardi’s bartender asks Hart, who wrote “Pal Joey,” “Babes in Arms” and “The Boys from Syracuse” with Richard Rodgers, and is doing his darndest to not pound down whisky.Good question.Richard Linklater has directed “Blue Moon,” from a stunningly smart screenplay by Robert Kaplow, almost as if it is one. The movie ventures to just a few places: the seats of a theater, the bar at Sardi’s, its dining room and coat room.

Sharp, clever monologues abound.There’s a piano player.

It would make a fantastic play.Staginess on-screen usually annoys me.Not so here.

Not only is the subject matter an ideal fit for the cheat-out approach.But if you’ve ever encountered a theater vet on a barstool — full of juicy behind-the-curtain stories, catty jokes and, as the night goes on, inevitable sadness — you know they’re always performing for a packed house. Even when nobody else is there.It’s just Hart and his barman at Sardi’s on the March 1943 opening night of “Oklahoma!,” the first musical his former collaborator has written without him.

He ducked out early, claiming to have hated it.“Any title that feels the need for an exclamation point, you need to steer clear of,” pretentious Hart snipes.There’s also a prophetic, nervous sense that his career — and life — are coming to a close.He has a drinking problem, and “Oklahoma!,” much to his chagrin, is an obvious smash.

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