February 21, 2026

by Ann Powers

The Lorenz Hart biopic Blue Moon — starring Ethan Hawke and directed by Richard Linklater — sent our critic down a rabbit hole of conflicting emotions.

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

Hello blue moon babies,

I’m still catching up on cinematic awards-season contenders, and the other night I watched Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s slice-of-life biopic of the legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, which just became available for viewing on Netflix. It’s an erudite film, pop philosophy on the rocks in a crystal glass, and Ethan Hawke’s Oscar-nominated turn as the closeted, self-loathing writer behind exquisite songs like “My Funny Valentine” and “Where or When” (and the movie’s title track) deserves all the praise it’s received – he pulls the viewer into Hart’s pathos when he could have easily let it messily spill forth. I wasn’t thrilled with the semi-fictional romance subplot that put Hart’s closeted sexuality at the center of his downfall; much more interesting was the debate, staged in a series of interrupted hallway and staircase conversations, between Hart and his erstwhile writing partner Richard Rodgers (a suave and chilly Andrew Scott) about popular art and the cravings of the American audience. That suited my mood right now, because ultimately, it positions Hart as a champion of a feeling I’ve been marinating in lately: bittersweetness.

There are surprisingly many ways to define the bittersweet, but this film, like Hart’s greatest lyrics, makes a case for it as a form of committed complexity. Blue Moon takes place on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the genre-changing musical that shot Rodgers to fame alongside a new creative partner, Oscar Hammerstein; its dramatic tension emanates from a philosophical debate about whether that play’s boisterous, broadly staged emotional palette represents a step down from the sophisticated wit and psychological subtlety of Rodgers and Hart efforts like Pal Joey. During a long conversation that signals the end of their fruitful connection, Hart and Rodgers revisit their shared accomplishments, appreciating each other, until Hart accuses Rodgers of pandering. “They want to cry a little,” Rodgers tells Hart of the crowds drawn to the gingham spectacle his old partner calls “corn-pone Americana.” He bangs his chest. “They want to feel.” Hart takes offense at this implication that he’s out of touch with America’s soul, accusing Rodgers of “writing my obituary.” Rodgers’ gently delivered dismissal is reductive – what’s more feelingful than the lovelorn holding pattern depicted in his and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”? Behind his rejection of Hart is the conviction that broader feelings – patriotism, optimism, playfully overt sexuality – better suits the wartime period than the internal debates Hart captured so well. Probably unintentionally, this scene in Blue Moon sets up the historical trajectory that would lead to the cathartic explosion of rock and roll a decade or so after Oklahoma’s triumph. More openly, it offers a grievance for Hart and others like him, the jazz-loving, blues-stricken, modernist bards of the Great American songbook, like Billy Strayhorn and Cole Porter, bittersweet geniuses.

When I happened upon Blue Moon, I was already noticing that a bittersweet tinge – always present in pop – is continually resurfacing within my listening this year. It’s showing up in hits like Ella Langley’s chart-topping honkytonk lament “Choosin’ Texas” and Noah Kahan’s intimate reflection on a fractured friendship, “The Great Divide.” It’s going viral thanks to the unexpected resurrection of “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today,” a 2008 slice of retro-pop by the duo She & Him, on TikTok. It’s the title of a tenacious hit by Madison Beer, an account of heartbreak that surrounds the experience in a synth-pop cloud of powdered sugar. And it’s at the heart of new songs signaling the return of a couple artists I love – “The Sweetest Lullabye” by the R&B chanteuse Alex Isley and “Everyone Around Me Dancing” by the electronically minded singer-songwriter Gia Margaret.

What elements do these varied songs share, placing them on the same emotional plane? Perhaps it’s necessary to define the term bittersweet to make that clear. I first thought deeply about it many years ago, when I discovered a book that became one of my eternal favorites: Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. The poet, dramatist and scholar’s journey back to the origins of the concept of eros – sexual and romantic desire – credits Sappho, in the first sentence, for noting how love and hate can converge within the experience. Carson notes the constant motion of desire, the way it exists in a space between imagination and fulfillment – “this is the most erotic thing about Eros,” she concludes. The bittersweet arises as a product of this volatility. To love is to experience pain and joy, and to not know when one or the other might take over.

To my ears, bittersweetness finds its best musical expression in songs that recreate this experience of being in between. Thinking about Rodgers and Hart’s masterpiece, “My Funny Valentine.” The lyric is almost cruel – “your looks are laughable, unphotographable,” Hart (who always saw himself as homely) ventures – only to swoon into an homage: “But you’re my favorite work of art.” Rodgers’ melody sways toward its peaks only to settle back into its valleys; even when it resolves, the ambivalence it expresses lingers. This is the bittersweet reality of love that just doesn’t make sense on paper but which takes over anyway, of falling for someone or enrapturing someone in a way that just doesn’t fit the usual expectations. The song consummates a union that is fulfilling but which retains an aura of sadness, because it carries a lesson: every love that lasts is, in the end, illogical, because every person will ultimately disappoint their lover in some way, so deluded are we by expectations that exceed the limits of what any human can be or do. People have limits; love does not. That’s what hurts, but also what keeps us loving.

If a song is too cathartic, if it offers that explosive moment when all norms are shattered, it can’t be bittersweet. The songs I mention either stay in a carefully moderated zone of tension and slight, momentary release, or their climactic moments are quickly pulled back. “Choosin’ Texas,” for example, has a rousing bridge, but ends in loping repetition as its protagonist sits at the bar and watches her erstwhile man dance off with someone else. “The Great Divide” is the kind of stomp-clap anthem that Kahan can deliver effortlessly, but he complicates the form by telling an unfinished story of a friendship that’s drifted; he cries for forgiveness, but only in his mind. He’s stuck in a round of mixed emotions, and only within the song itself does he experience peace as he imagines his lost pal also doing so. The bittersweetness of these ballads is intensified by the absence of the loved one toward whom they’re directed. All the love in the world can’t fully resolve these heartaches.

The bittersweet turns exquisite when the person expressing it resolves to thrive within its ambiguities. Isley’s “Sweetest Lullabye,” a quiet storm rhapsody musically evoking tidepools bathed in moonlight, follows the example of Bonnie Raitt’s classic testimony of adjusted expectations, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” by giving a lover permission to remain unsettled, “sailing through.” In her gorgeously subdued, satin voice, Isley sings, “you feel like home, you feel like somewhere,” instantly displacing her own fantasy that this love will last. Gia Margaret pushes her own ambivalence toward melancholy in “Everyone Around Me Dancing”; its glacial tone, established by a heartbeat rhythm and Margaret’s electronically altered, arpeggiated vocals, nearly does away with the sweet side of bitter to descend into depression. But the saxophone line that runs through the song is like a portable torch that melts the corners of the ice. Will the singer, “dirt and bloated,” take up the invitations of those who are shaking off their sorrow all around her? “Equilibrium,” Margaret repeats, protecting it. But the possibility that she will disturb it, free herself from its weight, remains.

I hear bittersweetness explored in so many different ways in so many recent songs. I’ve made a playlist of those I’ve noticed; I’d love to know if this mood, this way of viewing the world, is evident in the music you’ve been loving, too. Lately I’ve been thinking that leaning into the bittersweet is really a means of survival – a way of absorbing indignities and disappointments and retaining a sense of what’s possible, some reason to live. Lorenz Hart didn’t find such a peaceful ending in his own life, but he gave us a way to imagine it in his greatest songs. It’s a coping mechanism, maybe, but what a beautiful one.

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Bård Gunderson

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