Pop Culture Diary:This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups

What I've Been Into...

"Blue Moon" (2025). I enjoyed this dramatic portrait of great American songwriter Lorenz Hart far more than I'd anticipated.

Ethan Hawke, as Hart, is an actor I've never completely resonated with. Something about his usual performances has struck me as a little pretentious and knowing, as if he's trying too hard, but pretending that he's a natural. But I felt nothing of the sort watching him in this role. Hawke embodied the part and made Hart real in all of his very human contradictions: funny, brilliant, romantic, jealous, petty, pathetic and heartbreaking.

And the script by Robert Kaplow is sumptuous — full of wit and pathos. It'd be worthy of reading on its own.

As a film, the production is very play-like. All of the action takes place in one evening — the night of the Broadway debut of "Oklahoma!," the blockbuster by Hart's former collaborator Richard Rogers and his new foil Oscar Hammerstein II. And it all happens in one place, Sardi's the famed show business gathering spot where playwrights and songsmiths congregate to read their early reviews.

Over the course of the evening, we get to know Hart and sympathize with him as he pays witness to what he knows is the end of his career. He's lost his battle with the bottle, has a one-sided infatuation with a younger woman (Margaret Qualley), and has been supplanted by Oscar Hammer II as Rogers' chief collaborator.

We see the humanity that gives birth and is then eclipsed by art. Hart can never top himself, and he knows it. And just to remind him, the tune he's written that everyone knows best is the one he loves the least.

The film is a gem and, remarkably one of two director Richard Linklater (the second is "Nouvelle Vague") released last year.

"Marshall Rogers: Brightest Days & Darkest Knights," edited by Jeff Messer and Dewey Cassell (2025). I was only 11 years old at the time, but I knew I was reading something special when I had the great fortune pick up Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers' classic Batman run in Detective Comics #471–476 back in 1977. This Batman was SO cool and the story seemed so grownup.

I'd known, even as a kid, that Batman could be this way. I'd read the Golden Age stories and the O'Neill-Adams stuff collected in "Batman from 30's to the 70's." But here was a back-to-basics reinvention of the character happening before my own eyes, in real time.

The run also made me more cognizant of comics creators and how some of them stood out via their unique styles and how some seemed to put more of their heart and souls into their work.

Rogers had heart, soul and style to burn. He made Batman his own and the stories he created with Englehart stand up as among the best and most influential Batman stories ever.

This book, via interviews with the late Rogers, Englehart, inker Terry Austin (who also was vital to the talent mix that created that classic run), revisits that period and reflects on how special it was, both to readers and to its creators.

The text also is revelatory in capturing how controversial the stories were with some of the DC Comics brass. How could anyone not love this stuff? But apparently some people hated it. Some in the DC offices didn't care for how different Rogers' Batman appeared, and they especially didn't like that Englehart, Rogers and Austin were generating so much name recognition. The company line was to keep creators virtually anonymous and not to mess with the formula.

Also made clear is how tragically little Rogers managed to create during his too-short life.

He worked slowly, and the detail and care he put into his artwork shows why, and, unable to keep up with deadlines, didn't last long on any particular title, although he put in memorable runs on Silver Surfer and Doctor Strange as well as on Detective. And he died of a heart attack at only age 57. But his work stands as unforgettably vital to the history of Batman and American superhero comics. This book shows why and celebrates the man and his work.

Sunday Reads:

Via Smithsonian: How Miles Davis birthed cool.

Bills mounted, and Davis’ ascent slowed as he served a heroin habit. He kicked dope a few times, suffering days and nights of sweats and chills. In 1954, he got clean in earnest. The next year, Columbia Records signed him and bent its marketing apparatus toward making him a superstar, and Davis formed a breathtakingly versatile quintet that included John Coltrane on tenor sax. And boy, could Davis work a band. As the great critic Stanley Crouch wrote, this historic combo “stoked fire as ably as it crooned.”

In the two sessions released in 1959 as Kind of Blue, Davis introduced unfamiliar melodic scales into jazz, and what might have been an obscure modal experiment instead became the biggest jazz album ever recorded. Davis took the wartime sound of bebop and turned down the volume and heat without sacrificing intensity. He’d made a new and beautiful kind of Cold War art, bringing acoustic jazz to such a point of perfection that when he introduced electric guitars, a decade later, many critics—especially Crouch—treated it as the vilest heresy, ever. (They were wrong; Davis’ fusion bands were often brilliant. But so what?)