Raining. An alley near Broadway. We see the shadowy figure of the 48-year-old Lorenz Hart, wearing his topcoat like a cloak. His cigar glows and he’s talk-singing to himself. While his voice suggests he may have been drinking, he is not remotely incoherent. As he lurches among the garbage cans, he sings a fragment of the 1926 song Everything Happens to Me, to music heard only in his head.
These opening lines not only set the scene for Blue Moon, an Oscar-nominated screenplay about the tragic life of a once-great lyricist, but also posed a challenge for the film’s makers: can a movie that harks back to a golden era of Broadway, set in one of its most famous bars, be shot in…