The 21st century hasn’t been good to musicians. People always point to peak CD right when Napster kicked in, but imagine what it must’ve been like to be a songwriter in Chicago or New York when The Great American Songbook was still open for submissions. One of the most recent, if not the last, song to enter the canon is “New York, New York” by John Kander and Fred Ebb. It was written for Martin Scorsese’s 1977 movie of the same name, and covered by Frank Sinatra two years later in the recording most people know. Lorenz Hart may have died in the gutter at 47, drunk and already washed up, but he wrote the words to “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Manhattan,” “I Could Write a Book” and “Blue Moon.” His musical collaborator, Richard Rodgers, would go on to even greater success, with enduring works such as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, all co-written with Oscar Hammerstein II.
Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater from a script by Robert Kaplow, focuses on Hart (Ethan Hawke), holding court at Sardi’s, just weeks before he died. It’s March 1943, and Oklahoma! has opened to critical success and even greater public popularity, and former partner Rodgers (Andrew Scott) is aloof and clearly ready to rid himself of this manic, neurotic, alcoholic nuisance—his new collaborator, Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), appears to have himself together, although he’s kinder and more patient with Hart.
Hawke is, somehow, a full foot shorter, and if Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly necessarily struggled to find enough places to put the camera in a single location over two hours, I’m sure most of that time was spent putting Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, and the rest of the cast on platforms wearing stilts. Hawke’s rat-a-tat cattiness is entertaining enough to excuse the dull, flat lighting and coloring of the film, yet another period piece shot in cold digital with too much detail. It bugged me, but I’m sure it would’ve KILLLLLLLLLLED poor Mr. Hart. Hawke is excellent, but it’s not the performance of his career—that has yet to come.
Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a far more rousing and menacing film, thoroughly unnerving despite some frustratingly obvious narrative devices. Rose Byrne plays a therapist with a daughter and a mostly absent husband, and most of the movie is widescreen close-ups of her tired, tired, face. Bronstein and cinematographer Christopher Messina deliberately conceal her daughter’s face and the husband, played by a Gen X heartthrob, until the very end. The effect works when you see the husband, but when you see her daughter, it’s something else… If I Had Legs I’d Kick You alternately annoyed and unsettled me, and while I was growing restless with certain strategies, the movie had an undeniable pull and pall; with about half an hour left, I realized that the movie was having a physical effect on me. Bronstein, like her husband Ronald, co-writer of Uncut Gems, has the ability to lull the audience into a state of dread without them realizing it, and have them wake up in the throes of a minor panic attack.
But If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an anxiety of another color compared to Adam Sandler’s jewelry hustle. Nagged by the suspicion—certainty—that so much of this has to be a dream, eventually you get scared when the movie doesn’t wake up. The final shot, and the final line, delivered by the daughter, snap the entire movie into focus as in Ozu’s Late Spring and John Ford’s Fort Apache. For what it’s worth, I saw If I Had Legs I’d Kick You late on a Saturday night, with a full row of teenagers up in the back and two slightly tipsy, talkative women down in front. The movie got us all from the start, and at the very end, there were frogs in throats, and conversations that I didn’t hear.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith