By David D’Arcy

A review of two backstage (or offstage) comedies at the Berlinale –– Blue Moon and Koln 75.

Ethan Hawke with Margaret Qualley in Blue Moon.

One of the surprises of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was a look back to one day in the life of the American lyricist Lorenz Hart.

Hart was dead at 47 in November 1943 after collapsing drunk and sick on Eighth Avenue, in the same year that composer and former collaborator Richard Rogers premiered Oklahoma! on Broadway with Oscar Hammerstein II.

Hart’s decline haunts the heartfelt period comedy Blue Moon, directed with affection by Richard Linklater and written with wit by Robert Kaplow. It stars Ethan Hawke as the lyricist who struggled with his changing status — from star to has-been.

The narrative rewinds to the previous spring, when Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. It was the play that signaled the deterioration of Hart’s collaboration with Rodgers. The show ran for five years in New York. The revivals keep coming to this day.

Hart wasn’t much to look at, and he knew it. He was five feet tall and bald. He was gay in an era when few were out. He lived with his mother. It took a gifted cameraperson to compress Hawke into a five-foot frame, and an equally gifted makeup team to shave his head and give him a greasy comb-over. This is the physically unimposing Hart who walks out of Oklahoma! and takes charge in an empty bar — a facsimile Sardi’s in Ireland, where the film was shot.

Hart bemoans everything about the show, noting, with envy, that if its title comes with an exclamation point, you shouldn’t expect too much. He wasn’t alone. One writer noted that “Stephen Sondheim once explained the plot of Oklahoma! as being about which guy is going to take the girl to the party.” Not high praise, but to say that Oklahoma! was one of America’s most influential musicals is like saying that Hart was short.

Hart cadges shots from the bartender, who knows the man shouldn’t drink, jokes with a young GI on leave playing the piano, who recognizes the title of one of his songs. It’s a tiny crowd, but not hard to win over. The lyricist has plans for the evening. He’ll try to woo his “protégée,” a college girl whose mother works at an elite production agency, The Theater Guild. Never mind that he finds out she has a love interest already — or that he’s gay. Hart also has plans to revive his partnership with Richard Rogers. The drunker the man becomes, the more likely it looks that neither gambit will work.

Fueled by booze, Hart pontificates, though he is self-conscious enough to make excuses where some others made fun. He opines on Casablanca: “You know what I like about Claude Rains? He’s a real man and he’s short, which proves you can be both.”

Brave in a role where, to put it mildly, he doesn’t look his best, Hawke plays all of Hart’s sides — clever, charming, bitchy, generous, authoritative, weak, self-mocking, and reliably self-destructive. The surrounding cast doesn’t turn this one-man show into an ensemble; Bobby Cannavale is a one-note bartender with the right accent, Margaret Qualley is a dutiful, ditzy student. Still, with the agile Hawke there, they don’t need to do much. And Andrew Scott is just right as the impatient, no-nonsense Rodgers, a reality-check of a collaborator who offers Hart one more chance to stage a revised revival of A Connecticut Yankee. But he expects the worst from his erratic partner. Hart, in fact, did deliver new songs. Then he died. The revival died four months into its run.

Depression and alcohol did the man in, and Hawke (thanks to Kaplow’s clever script) draws you, skillfully delivering every argument that a wordsmith like Hart would make to protest his destiny. Gentle and humane, Linklater and Kaplow give him a wealth of zinger one-liners until the end.

Given that the Academy Awards just careened by, it’s premature — but still safe — to say that this is the kind of performance that wins awards. It’s safer to say that Hawke will surprise the public once Blue Moon is released.

Mala Emde running in the street in Koln 75.

More than three decades later, in 1975, an ailing Keith Jarrett stumbled onto the stage in Cologne, Germany, after the opera Lulu finished, and gave a performance that turned out to be among the most memorable and most profitable in the history of jazz. It is the subject of Koln 75, sort of.

This film, directed by Ido Fluk, and applauded by the mostly German crowds who saw it, is set around and during that concert, for which the word consequential is not strong enough. But it is about something besides Keith Jarrett and his music.

It’s the story of an enterprising jazz groupie, until then a fun-loving but frustrated teenage daughter of dour, officious parents. She schedules that after hours concert at the Cologne Opera house on borrowed money and makes it happen through sheer determination.

Young Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) is the rebellious daughter of a tyrannical dentist. It’s Germany in 1975, so you wonder about his past. She enjoys parties and goes to jazz clubs. She sees a business opportunity. Someone with a brain and a telephone (and someone other than the men currently controlling business) could book jazz musicians on successful tours that would build audiences for the players and the venue.

Brandes has a flair for staging these kinds of shows, and she sets her sights sky high, at the already-acclaimed pianist Keith Jarrett, whose public in Germany at that point had room to grow. She talks her skeptical mother into lending her 10,000 marks to book the opera house after hours, and talks the reluctant Jarrett (John Magaro), grumpy and ill, into playing the concert on a suboptimal piano.

This is a case of chutzpah becoming history, although the history here is essentially the breakthrough event in the career of the promoter Brandes, whose fame increased to the point she became a German show business legend. She still never got the recognition that director Ido Fluk thinks she deserved. Who knew? Half a century later, the off-stage yarn left the sold-out German audience swooning at the film’s premiere.

If you admire Jarrett and his music, as I do, this sideshow of a story may not be the film for you, even though some critics disagree with me and find Magaro’s performance as a sickly grouch endearing. Like Blue Moon, it’s a backstage (or offstage) comedy, not a performance film. Jarret wouldn’t cooperate and his music  isn’t even used — yet once the ball got rolling when the film was screened at the former home of the Berlin Philharmonic, the event felt like a blowout victory on the football field for the home team, complete with rousing scenes of earnest German kids racing to get the concert up and running that seemed inspired by 1998’s Run Lola Run.

In show business terms, Koln 75 played like an update of the venerable Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland formula — “let’s buy a bar, let’s put on a show” — crowd-pleasing MGM money-maker. Jarrett just happens to be the name of the guy slumped on the piano.

To be fair, Emde, playing a role that requires lots of smiles and guile, has the charisma and the energy to carry you through Brandes’s early days. The film is directed competently by Fluk, an American, but I can’t imagine anyone but Germans going to see it. Some Jarrett fans may still stumble in if they read the title and think it’s a documentary.

Speaking of Germans, a neofascist party with an imprimatur from J.D. Vance has now finished second with German voters and fueled Elon Musk’s raptures. Given those coming attractions for a Fourth Reich, a feel-good feminist comedy about a plucky  jazz promoter is far from the worst thing out there.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.