When History Hangs Out

Jacob Stern reviews Richard Linklater’s two latest films, “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon,” as twin hangout movies.

By Jacob SternNovember 21, 2025

• Film

• History

ALTHOUGH HE SURELY did not conceive of them this way, Richard Linklater’s two new movies about old-school entertainment together comprise the highest-production-value How It Started–How It’s Going meme ever made. The first, Nouvelle Vague, follows the director Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) through the making of his first feature film, Breathless (1960), which would become one of the most influential films in the history of the medium. Godard is darkly handsome and imperturbably suave. He almost never bothers with a second take. He shoots for an hour and calls it a wrap for the day. His cast is incredulous, but they go along with it; his producer is irate, and occasionally threatens to pull funding, but never all that seriously. Everything seems to break Godard’s way, even when it doesn’t.

The second film, Blue Moon, follows Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), the lyricist and onetime partner to the composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), on the opening night of Oklahoma! It’s Rodgers’s first musical since ditching Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), and it’s also the greatest success of his career. “We write together for a quarter of a century, and the first show he writes with someone else is gonna be the biggest hit he ever had,” Hart snipes. “Am I bitter? Fuck yes!” If Godard knows his time has come, even if others can’t see it yet, then Hart knows his time has passed, even if he can’t admit it yet.

Fundamentally, Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both hangout movies, brought to you by the undisputed champion of that division. Going back to his 1990 breakout Slacker, Linklater has always been most interested in the way people relate to each other. (Not that he can’t deliver on plot—just look at his most recent effort, the 2023 Glen Powell crime comedy Hit Man.) In classics such as Dazed and Confused (1993), Waking Life (2001), and Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), narrative is almost beside the point. The Before Trilogy films (1995–2013) are all really romantic hangout movies; Boyhood (2014) is a hangout bildungsroman stretched across 12 years.

The magic trick of these films is the way they defy the Newtonian laws of story: nothing happens, and you’re never bored—propulsion with no engine. They work because, cinematically speaking, Linklater is the ultimate good hang.

But he is not, of course, the genre’s originator. American Graffiti (1973), My Dinner with Andre (1981), and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) are obvious forebears. Quentin Tarantino, who is generally credited with coining the term, sees Rio Bravo (1959) as the greatest of the lot. The genre, he has said, is defined not by its plotting or dynamic camerawork but by the way that “you hang out with the characters so much, they actually become your friends.” In the space of a couple hours, these movies establish the sort of parasocial relationships that modern podcast hosts aspire to forge over hundreds of hours of listening. They’re the kind of movies that you want not just to watch but to live in as well, and that you rewatch over and over so that, for a brief time, you can.

Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon fit neatly into that lineage, but in slightly different ways. The former has an ostensible plot—let’s make a movie!—but no tension. We know historically that Breathless is going to get made and succeed, and at no point does Linklater try to manufacture any artificial worry that it won’t. The movie is a nondrama, concerned more with channeling a moment (late-night soirées, smoke-filled cafés, every notable French filmmaker you can think of, all pictured in 35 mm monochrome) than with generating suspense, and it’s at its best when the characters just sit around and hang out—which, thanks to Godard’s unorthodox methods, they do, a lot.

Blue Moon is more straightforwardly a hangout movie, at least on its face. It spans a single night in a single bar—Sardi’s, that old Broadway fixture, with its dark-wood paneling and red leather booths and perfect white tablecloths—where Hart has dragged himself after leaving the premiere of Oklahoma! early. He has seen enough; he needs a drink. We spend the rest of the movie at the bar with Hart and a small cast of supporting characters: Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), Morty “Knuckles” Rifkin the pianist (Jonah Lees), and a handful of others, some nameless, some famous. Hart tells “Andy” (E. B.) White (Patrick Kennedy) about the middle-class mouse named Stuart that has taken up residence in his kitchen; he advises George (Roy) Hill (David Rawle) to tell friendship stories, not love stories, because that, he says, is “where the really enduring stuff lives”; he receives some frank feedback on his lyrics from 13-year-old Little Stevie (Sondheim, played by Cillian Sullivan).

They all listen as Hart holds court about the enormous party he’s throwing later that night—everyone in show business will be there! He complains endlessly about Oklahoma! (“cornpone Americana,” “fraudulent on every possible level”). Over and over, he circles back to Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), the 20-year-old Yale sophomore with whom he’s hopelessly in love. “It is more complicated than you can possibly imagine,” he says, but he knows it’s not, and everyone else does too. It’s an abject cliché, the sort he’d disparage mercilessly if he read it in print—the 47-year-old mentor falling for his undergraduate protegée. Still, he can’t help himself, and he thinks tonight might be the night they’ll finally go to bed together.

While he waits for her, Hart jabbers on to Eddie and Knuckles and White, and they all drink and sing and run lines from Casablanca (1942). (Hart’s favorite: “Nobody ever loved me that much.”) With its single set, limited cast, and hypertheatrical repartee, the whole movie feels like a stage play. It has none of the semi-stoned naturalism of Linklater’s other hangout masterpieces. And yet the characters are still basically doing the same thing as the ballplayers in Everybody Wants Some!! and the high schoolers in Dazed and Confused—which is not much.

Except here, there’s a touch of darkness to the whole thing. It’s no spoiler to tell you that Hart ends up dead. We see his demise in the first scene of the movie: Hart at night, crumpling to the pavement in a rainy New York alleyway. We learn from a radio announcer that he dies in a hospital not long after, then the film immediately cuts to seven months earlier, when the movie gets going in earnest. In other words, we know from the beginning that this is the end. Circulating around Sardi’s, vibrating with desperate energy, Hart is one of those stars that burns brightest just before it goes out. The movie’s still a hangout movie, but it’s also a eulogy, something Hart keeps telling people that they sound like they’re giving him (and that we the audience, with the benefit of the prologue, know they sort of are).

If Nouvelle Vague is a hangout movie in disguise, then Blue Moon is something else disguised as a hangout movie; if the former is nostalgic, the latter is about nostalgia. Linklater has always been obsessed with time—not in the way that, say, Christopher Nolan is, as an abstract concept or an intellectual puzzle, but as it applies to human beings. Linklater is interested in how it creases brows, stokes longings, curdles romances. His most memorable characters are constantly talking about it, thinking about it, tortured by it. They feel nostalgic for the present, even for the future. “All he could think about was that he was looking at something that was gonna die someday,” Ethan Hawke’s Jesse tells Julie Delpy’s Céline in Before Sunrise, recalling a friend’s reaction to the birth of his child. “[W]e’re not real anyway,” Céline says to Jesse nine years later in Before Sunset. “We’re just characters in that old lady’s dream. She’s on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth.” If not for the time period, they might as well be characters in Hart’s dreams, as he lies on his deathbed, fantasizing that someone finally loved him that much.

Nouvelle Vague, like many of Linklater’s most successful hangout movies, is animated by nostalgia. It is, first and foremost, an homage to the French New Wave, and those seeking a critical excavation will not find it. The characters look the way they’re supposed to, talk the way they’re supposed to, smoke the way they’re supposed to. It’s a masterful recreation, down to the 4:3 aspect ratio, the grain of the film, and the cigarette burns in the corners. In a post-screening Q and A at the Telluride Film Festival, Linklater explained that he even borrowed the camera Godard used to make Breathless from the French museum that houses it.

The core idea of the movie boils down to Man, wouldn’t it have been great to have been there? And for 106 minutes, it is. If the movie isn’t as much fun as Dazed and Confused or Everybody Wants Some!!—and what is?—it may just be because Linklater wasn’t actually there on set in 1959. There’s a difference between you shoulda been there and I wish I’d been there.

Blue Moon is not immune to nostalgia: it, too, is a period piece tinged with more than a little retrospective romance. But it’s a bleaker, sadder movie than Nouvelle Vague, a movie about a guy in a bar thinking about the past and deluding himself into believing he can recapture it. He thinks about his early, successful days writing music with Rodgers on his living room floor. He thinks about that summer weekend in the cabin with Elizabeth, the way she looked, sitting in the sunlight, in the blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Hart’s best days are behind him, but they may never have existed in the first place. Rodgers, in his conversations with Hart, recalls their working relationship somewhat less rosily, and from the moment Elizabeth appears on-screen, her dynamic with Hart casts doubt on whether their weekend together ever had the romantic potential he imagines it did. He is guilty, in short, of the very sin for which he excoriates Rodgers’s Oklahoma!: sentimental longing for a world that never was.

Hart, in his despair, recalls the mother played by Patricia Arquette in Boyhood, who, near the end of that movie, delivers arguably the most tragic line in Linklater’s entire filmography: “I just thought there would be more.” Deep down, Hart knows that there won’t be. He toasts “the great and glorious past, when it all mattered so much.” He compares himself to an American soldier shipping off to war, who knows that he is not coming back. His picture, he notices, has already lost its position of prominence on the wall at Sardi’s. “You know how in a marriage they say ‘for better or for worse’?” he asks White. “I think, in terms of my life, I’ve entered the ‘for worse’ part.”

Everyone around him knows he’s done for. Rodgers and Eddie and even Knuckles, whom he has only just met that evening. You can see it in their eyes, in the pained kindness they show him. They wish they could help him and they know that they can’t. By the end of the night, even Hart himself must know it too. He confesses his love to Elizabeth, and she tells him, as so many others seem to have before, that she does love him—“just not that way.” He introduces her to Rodgers and proceeds to watch his two great loves walk out the door arm in arm, leaving him, as he once wrote, “standing alone, / without a dream in [his] heart, / without a love on [his] own.” The door shuts, and he stands there for a moment, watching after them.

But Hart is not entirely resigned. Between moments of desolation, he insists that there will be more. He tells Rodgers that he’s ready to work again, that he wants to write a grand musical about Marco Polo, that it’ll be four hours with a dinner-break intermission. Satirical but with an emotional core, it will be a masterpiece to rival the success of Rodgers’s latest. He insists to anyone who will listen that Elizabeth will realize that she needs him, that she loves him. When he tells White that he identifies with the “doomed hopefulness” of the mouse living in his kitchen, the oxymoron somehow makes perfect sense.

If that all sounds unbearably depressing, I assure you that it isn’t, because this is a Richard Linklater movie (and is not Suburbia). You want to hang out with these people. You want to be around Hart in his moment of defeat just as much as (or even more than) you want to be around Godard in his moment of triumph. Taken together, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague show the full range of the hangout movie—and of the hangout itself. Hanging out, Linklater has always known, is both the way we collectively remember and, when we do, the thing we’ll collectively remember. Blue Moon depicts the reminiscing, Nouvelle Vague the product of that reminiscence.

When Hart returns to the bar, having lost the girl he never had, Eddie and Knuckles are waiting for him. He gathers his things to leave for his party (which, by this point, we strongly suspect will never happen), insisting that Elizabeth will show up late, having realized she needs him. But as he gets up from the bar, Knuckles starts playing “Blue Moon,” and they all start singing, and Hart stops. The lyrics may be, as he claims earlier in the evening, the worst he ever wrote, but at the end of the night, they offer him some solace. He sits back down and launches into the story of how he wrote the song. “Just as I suspected,” Eddie says to him, paraphrasing Casablanca. “You are a sentimentalist.”

Despite everything that we have seen Hart endure, despite the fate that we know awaits him, the movie ends on a high note. Maybe his career is over, and maybe no one will ever love him that way, but at least, right here and now, he has the company of friends. In this final communion, the movie becomes a meta-argument for its genre, a case for hanging out—and the hangout movie—as something more than a way to have some fun or pass the time. It’s an existential balm, the string keeping him suspended above the void. It’s not quite salvation, but it’s the best we’ve got.