Telluride Film Festival Reviews: ‘Blue Moon’ & ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Offer A Tale of Two Oscars 2026 Best Actor Contenders

Telluride Film Festival update: Megan McLachlan reviews Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, both featuring two awards-worthy performances from their leading men.

It’s become an unwritten rule at the Oscars: If you play a real-life person, you probably have a shot — if not a slot — in any of the acting categories. Even better if you’re playing a musician!

This Oscars 2026 season, we have two shining musical contenders in the Best Actor race: Ethan Hawke, who plays lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, and Jeremy Allen White, who plays Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

Ethan Hawke Disappears into Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Bittersweet Blue Moon 

Ethan Hawke shrinks smaller and smaller in every frame of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, as if his Lorenz Hart is fading from existence. Featuring a harsh comb-over and severe wrinkles, Lorenz marks the least Ethan Hawke performance of Ethan Hawke performances, and yet it features all the hallmarks of what we love about his work in films like Before Sunset and Boyhood. It’s always a joy to watch Hawke rattle off dialogue, but this time, he disappears into this shrill character.

After the premiere of Oklahoma! (with an exclamation point!), Hawke’s Hart heads to Sardi’s for the after-party. The show ushers in the first-time collaboration between Hart’s former musical partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), and he complains about the silliness of “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” and that damn exclamation point in the title. He also tells bartender buddy Eddie (Bobby Canavale) that he’s in love with a 20-year-old named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) — this, despite his proclivities toward preferring men.

Set in one location over one evening, Blue Moon feels like the type of movie directors don’t want to make anymore. It’s talkie, and dare I say — Woody Allen-esque — and while a conversation in a coat closet with Elizabeth slows down the pacing of the film, Blue Moon is a lovely, bittersweet punctuation mark — probably an em dash — on a brilliant life cut short, featuring the performance of Hawke’s career.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Attempts to Be the Anti-Musical-Biopic with an Impressive Performance from Jeremy Allen White

Director Scott Cooper has come a long way from 2009’s Crazy Heart, his Oscar-winning film with Jeff Bridges. Despite being a fictional account of a country musician, that film followed the musical biopic formula by the numbers. However, with Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Cooper attempts to deconstruct what audiences expect from such films in a fresh way. You’re not getting a Boss biopic with all the jukebox hits; DMFN tackles depression, toxic masculinity, and the ennui of fame with complexity — and all his deep-cut songs. It’s only toward the end of the film that it falls a bit into the trappings of what you expect from a biopic, but even so, it never feels like a cliche. It’s no wonder Springsteen felt comfortable with Cooper telling his story in this way.

Just as Ethan Hawke’s Hart physically shrinks throughout Blue Moon, Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen figuratively tries to put himself in the margins of his own life in DMFN. Allen White really captures the spirit of Springsteen — surprisingly so. And it’s not an imitation; he really inhabits the character and brings that Bear intensity — along with “humility and swagger,” according to Cooper — that makes him the perfect Boss.

As music producer Jon Landau, Jeremy Strong counters Allen White’s intensity with empathy and compassion, as he tries to understand how to not only help his client but also his friend. Some reviews have commented that Strong doesn’t have a lot to do in this role, but he really shines in showing how little we knew about depression at the time, as he talks through with his wife (Grace Gummer) what he suspects Bruce might be going through. He also demonstrates the difficulty of knowing when you have a hit record on your hands, but wanting to honor the integrity of the artist.

Telluride Film Festival continues through September 1.