It’s doubtful that director Richard Linklater planned to have two movies opening at the same time. But thanks to the vagaries of the contemporary film release calendar — which more and more means hoarding all the interesting titles to fall festival season for year-end awards consideration, an overcrowded glut that serves nobody well — Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon” are competing for your attention in Boston area theaters at the moment. Both films are unconventional biopics about legendary 20th-century artists, but they couldn’t be more temperamentally opposed.
“Nouvelle Vague” is a jaunty comedy about the upstart young filmmakers of the French New Wave, following cheeky quote-machine Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) and his band of outsiders breaking all the rules while making “Breathless.” “Blue Moon” is a melancholy farce featuring a tour-de-force performance from Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, a boozy Broadway lyricist trying to keep it together at the triumphant opening night party for his former writing partner Richard Rodgers’ smash hit “Oklahoma!” Even if Linklater hadn’t intended it this way, taken in tandem the films feel like they complete each other. “Nouvelle Vague” is the early, euphoric rush of talent and exuberance before all the sadness and resentments of “Blue Moon” settle in. One’s the sunrise to the other’s sunset.
It’s probably no shock given this critic’s proclivities, but I thought the sunrise was just fine and I absolutely adored the sunset. In fact, it’s possible that “Nouvelle Vague” might have been too cute for me if I hadn’t already seen “Blue Moon” twice. Linklater’s breezy ode to the Cahiers du Cinéma crew is a sunny, occasionally silly portrait of the pointy-headed film critics who got behind the camera and revolutionized an art form. According to the movie’s postscript, 162 directors made their debuts during an incredible three-year explosion of creativity, and at times it feels like Linklater is trying to parade them all onscreen at once. Character entrances are accompanied by documentary-style identification cards, until it becomes part of the joke that you can’t possibly keep track of them.
Eventually, we zoom in on Godard, the last of the critics at Cahiers to make the leap to directing and the most amusingly obnoxious of the lot. Always smoking cigarettes and never removing his sunglasses, the impishly charming auteur speaks almost exclusively in aphorisms culled from the filmmaker’s writings and interviews over the years. (Nobody really talks like this, but Godard himself would probably be the first to remind you that it’s a movie, not real life.) He’s endlessly exasperating to Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg, the Hollywood starlet who only agreed to this gig because she figured anyone would be easier to work with than Otto Preminger. Now she’s not so sure. Deutch is adorable in the role, with some impossible shoes to fill. (She’s no Jean Seberg, but who is?)
Shooting in black-and-white and jump-cutting around to mimic movies of the era, Linklater turns the unorthodox production of “Breathless” into one of his ramshackle hangout comedies like “Dazed and Confused” and “Everybody Wants Some!!,” except with cinephiles instead of stoners and jocks. (Aubry Dullin’s laid-back, up-for-anything boxer-turned-actor Jean-Paul Belmondo could have strolled out of either of those party pictures.) There’s not as much film theory here as one might expect, and it’s kind of insane that somebody made a movie about Godard that never once mentions politics. But Linklater is more interested in the “Hey, let’s put on a show!” camaraderie of young colleagues working together on a low-budget movie, the thrill of watching crazy, creative ideas come to fruition with your friends. “Nouvelle Vague” might be a little too frothy and lightweight for its own good, but after the agonized self-seriousness of “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” it’s a relief to see a biopic that just wants to show you a good time.
The good times are over long before “Blue Moon” begins. We’re told at the outset that Hawke’s Lorenz Hart will be dead from drinking in four months’ time, and the film is something like an extended farewell for the logorrheic lyricist, who dutifully shows up at Broadway institution Sardi’s to congratulate his erstwhile collaborator Richard Rodgers (deftly played by Andrew Scott) on the night “Rodgers and Hart” officially became “Rodgers and Hammerstein.” It’s basically a movie about pretending to be happy at your ex’s wedding, and Hawke runs an extraordinary gamut of emotions from pettiness to horniness to heartbreak, spitting catty quips and spinning long-winded stories like he’s afraid that if he stops talking for a second everyone will realize how sad he is.
Outfitted somewhat unconvincingly to resemble the 4-foot-10-inch Hart, the actor is photographed standing in trenches or with his legs stuffed into holes in the floor, bellying up to a proportionally oversized bar. The illusion doesn’t really work — Hawke’s got the shoulders and build of a bigger guy — but it subconsciously adds to our sense of the character’s discomfort at the party. Sophisticated and urbane with a flair for wordplay, Hart is a man the times have passed by. The co-writer of “My Funny Valentine” and the movie’s title track can’t hide his contempt for “Oklahoma!,” with its vulgar exclamation point and corn as high as an elephant’s eye. (“What an ugly, nonsensical rhyme!”) He understands that this is what the audience wants now, and he wishes they wanted more.
My favorite Richard Linklater movies are the ones where Ethan Hawke gets to talk for the entire time. “Blue Moon” is their ninth collaboration and it’s a single-location blab-a-thon, taking place entirely at Sardi’s during the party. Robert Kaplow’s screenplay is a pleasure to listen to, witty and literate with running gags that double back and pay off so intricately I was surprised to learn it wasn’t originally a stage play. Hawke’s Hart banters with his beloved bartender (Bobby Cannavale) while occasionally wresting Rodgers away from crowds of well-wishers for conversations that begin graciously, but quickly degenerate into cutting barbs about old grudges and recriminations. They’re two people who did some of their best work together, and they clearly shouldn’t be working together anymore.
I could have done without the movie’s winking cameos from future Broadway legends, and a touchingly subtle turn by Patrick Kennedy as Hart’s sad-eyed drinking buddy E.B. White is a lily the filmmakers should have resisted gilding with a “Stuart Little” origin story. But all is forgiven in the final act, when the object of Hart’s most ardent affections arrives in the form of Margaret Qualley. (Kaplow’s screenplay is said to be based on the correspondence between Hart and her real life counterpart, the 20-year-old Elizabeth Weiland.) Cannavale jokes that he assumed the flamboyantly effete tunesmith’s “interests went in the other direction,” while Hart protests that he considers himself “an ambisexual.”
The truth is that she’s the walking embodiment of youthful beauty and vitality and everything that Hart feels has passed him by. He lavishes her with gifts and attention, and when Qualley’s onscreen it’s the only time in the whole movie he shuts up. She nails a mesmerizing monologue, and the final scenes of “Blue Moon” ripped this critic’s heart out, with Hart once again putting on a brave face, as everyone knows a girl like that is inevitably headed off to someone else’s afterparty while you’re here complaining to the bartender about arthritis in your shoulder. Heck, she could easily be walking out of this movie and into “Nouvelle Vague.”
“Nouvelle Vague” is now playing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Kendall Square Cinema before it starts streaming on Netflix Friday, Nov. 14. “Blue Moon” is now in theaters.