Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s Blue Moon essay contains spoilers. Richard Linklater’s 2025 movie on Amazon and Netflix features Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott.. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

The most recurrent theme in this year’s crop of Oscar hopefuls is resistance to authoritarianism in all its forms. From militaristic, eugenicist secret societies in One Battle After Another (2025) to government dictatorships (The Secret Agent, 2025) and their foot soldiers (It Was Just An Accident, 2025) in far flung nations, the films meeting the moment the most in the eyes of awards voters are either set in heightened dystopias, historical settings or countries they’ve never set foot in. Resistance to fascism is at the forefront of viewers’ minds, but each highlighted film is at a comfortable enough remove to stop the current administration’s actions in the United States from fully clouding their judgement.

LGBTQ people, and particularly the trans community, have disproportionately suffered under policies that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has ushered in, which is why it’s a surprise that they have been relegated to the margins even as the overall sentiment of resistance has echoed through several works. The only queer person in One Battle After Another is a non-binary friend of high school student Willa (Chase Infiniti), who rats her out to the authorities, likely on account of prison not being a particularly welcoming place for the gender non-conforming. In The Secret Agent, queerness is relegated to a hallucinatory interlude as a severed leg romps through a gay cruising area. You’d have to reach considerably to label either as an LGBTQ film, and there’s only one movie nominated in any major category which fits the distinction: Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a hangout biopic set in a Broadway world so accepting of queerness it barely warrants a direct mention.

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In my view, Blue Moon — and Ethan Hawke’s exquisitely catty performance as the washed-up lyricist Lorenz Hart — is amongst the finest cinematic achievements of 2025, transforming a theatre world after-party into a pressure cooker that can barely contain one troubled artist’s extremely vocal resentments. But the quality of Linklater’s film isn’t something I’d like to unpack in this column. Instead, I’m curious why Blue Moon has resonated in a prestige film season where queer stories have struggled to gain the traction they’ve recently become more liable to. It’s not like the Academy sympathizes with the same conservative mindset that has dominated American cultural discourse since Trump’s second inauguration, but the sole story centered around an openly queer character seems almost old-fashioned in the way its protagonist’s sexuality is only discussed through the form of a saucy double entendre.

Blue Moon Essay: Related — Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’

Blue Moon’s Lorenz Hart claims to be “ambisexual”” — a period-appropriate moniker for bisexuality, with the sole object of his desires being the 20-year-old aspiring creative Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), who looks at the protagonist strictly as a mentor. As to be expected from a period where homosexuality was a crime, the real-life Hart’s sexual orientation was merely a subject of gossip, at most an open secret, which is how screenwriter Robert Kaplow treats the material; it’s presumably one of the reasons why it’s left as ambiguous as it could possibly be in a contemporary interpretation of such an openly camp and catty figure. To a modern queer audience, the older songwriter’s fawning over Elizabeth feels analogous to the way Millennial and Gen-Z gays will breathlessly talk about their favorite female pop stars and actresses. Without the cultural language to properly describe that during this period, Lorenz’s infatuation with his younger protégé is wrongly interpreted as a romantic one, at least in my eyes.

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Lorenz Hart couldn’t be described as closeted, but any real-life uncertainty about his sexuality means that it manifests within the drama as an elephant in the room — a running joke whenever he brings up his desire for Elizabeth to anybody who will listen. In a year when more caution has been exercised towards rewarding queer stories than in recent memory, has the arm’s length portrayal of characters’ sexuality (as necessary to the drama as it may be) helped the Academy embrace a study of a prickly figure they’d never usually approach? It’s typically been the case that while portrayals of male antiheroes will be suitably rewarded, there’s more of a barrier to entry when it comes to depictions of more challenging and abrasive female characters. Rose Byrne’s nomination for her lead performance in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) suggests this glass ceiling may have finally been broken; however, that barrier remains intact when it comes to queer male characters, as you’d be hard pressed to find any which don’t conform to either tragic arcs or supporting comic relief get the dues they so often deserve.

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Hawke’s performance is a comic firecracker in Blue Moon, which opens with a flash-forward to Hart’s death several months after the drama takes place to underline an impending tragedy. Yet it resists either of those simple categorizations of the kind of queer portrayals the Academy prefers to award. Even after opening with the already-sealed fate of its lead, Kaplow’s script doesn’t attempt to make the protagonist either an endearing or one-note tragic figure, nor does the screenwriter rely on simplistic narrative devices like using Hart’s alcoholism as a justification for self-destructive behavior and the burning of every bridge around him. If you squint, it takes the familiar tragic narrative mold of many awards-baiting LGBTQ dramas from decades past, but this is a film made by people too intelligent to succumb to such reductive dramatic arcs. It’s prickly from the moment of Lorenz’s introduction; that the basic beats of his life story, and the way they broadly conform to the most outdated forms of prestige queer misery dramas, seep through into a bitchier backstage industry drama could be why Academy members were less resistant to this film than other queer stories. In a year when culture took a step back and to the right, a queer story resembling an old-fashioned tale of gay suffering could resonate in a way similar films haven’t for years.

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Is it reductive to view Blue Moon — which I must repeat, is one of my personal favorites of the past year — in this light? Absolutely. But this is a column attempting to determine which queer films will become canonical in the coming years, and even though Linklater’s 2025 movie doesn’t feel designed with an explicitly straight audience in mind, its anomalous appearance in a largely heterosexual narrative field of 2026 Oscar nominees gives the impression of something more old-fashioned, likelier to be brushed off and overlooked when future queer audiences look back at the cinema of 2025. When films as daring as Pillion (2025) fail to make the jump from precursor nominations to the main event, the success of Blue Moon can be seen as representative of the industry’s historical timidness towards sexuality resurfacing (even if, as we know in this current moment, it’s entirely due to lackluster campaigning on the part of rival studios). In my eyes, Blue Moon effortlessly resists tropes of queer suffering and troubled artists to become another delightful hangout character study from the American master of them. Any future attempt to retroactively define it as something more conservative and more representative of the current cultural mood towards depictions of queer people in public life should be resisted.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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