Blue Moon shows Ethan Hawke unlike you’ve ever seen him before.

The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. Ray , for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles’ 1960 recording of “ Georgia on My Mind ”? Last year’s A Complete Unknown featured a superb Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold’s well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like “ A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall .” Every so often, a truly original filmmaker will tell the story o