By Stuart Mitchner

New York and Times Square have been one and the same for me ever since I was a 10-year-old from Indiana watching the electronic news of the day winding around the old Times Building, one of many wonders of the city in those days, like the automat, like Ray Bolger onstage singing and dancing “Once In Love With Amy,” like Radio City Music Hall where my folks and I saw the 1948 biopic Words and Music about Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who was played by Mickey Rooney. Seven decades later here he is again being played, brilliantly, by Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s film Blue Moon.

Unforgettable

My original plan had been to do a Times Square New Year’s Eve centenary fantasia in which numerous 1925-born celebrities gather on New Year’s Eve in a night club like, say, Sardi’s, the setting for one of  Hawke’s most challenging roles. I don’t remember Mickey Rooney’s performance, but I’ll never forget the way Hawke bares his wayworn soul as Hart on the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma that by all rights he should have been sharing with his former partner Richard Rodgers. Nor will I forget Bobby Cannavale’s cool, compatible bartender or Patrick Kennedy’s masterfully understated turn as the New Yorker’s E.B. White.

City Lights

A few months ago when I learned from Wikipedia that F. Scott Fitzgerald shared his September 24 birthday with Georges Claude, “the man who invented neon lighting,” I was planning a piece on the bright lights of Times Square — until the news of Robert Redford’s death took me in a another direction. With a New Year’s Eve column in mind, I saved this paragraph from Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise: “New York burst upon him … with the brilliance of a long-anticipated event. His glimpse of it as a vivid whiteness against a deep-blue sky had left a picture of splendor that rivalled the dream cities in the Arabian Nights; but this time he saw it by electric light, and romance gleamed from the chariot-race sign on Broadway.”

As for my own Times Square fantasia in which centenarian celebrities convene for New Year’s Eve around the age of 35, the possibilities were exciting. For people born in 1925 you get combinations like Don Juan mystery man Carlos Castaneda and singer June Christy nursing Margaritas side by side at Sardi’s bar, while Lenny Bruce and William F. Buckley are packed in the same booth having an intense conversation as an ailing Flannery O’Connor discusses her work with Gore Vidal. For sounds, you’d have Art Pepper, Zoot Sims, and Oscar Peterson taking the stand for a midnight rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Ethan Hawke’s Birthday

So why does Hawke’s virtuoso turn as Larry Hart keep surfacing whenever I imagine a New Year’s Eve at Sardi’s? Thinking he might have some kind of anniversary coming up, I found that in fact he celebrated his 55th birthday this November 6. Wait a minute, there’s something scarily familiar about that number. No wonder: on Christmas Day Netflix streamed episodes 5, 6, and 7 of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, with the grand finale set for New Year’s Eve. It turns out that the whole adventure began when Will Byers was sucked into the Upside Down on November 6, 1983, forever after known worldwide as Stranger Things Day. So goodbye Times Square, hello Hawkins, Indiana.

Goodbye “Stranger Things”

According to Ross Duffer, “Some of our favorite movies, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Breaking Away, were set in Indiana. We were looking at the aesthetics of those movies, and we were excited about putting this in Indiana.”

So I’m back home again in Stranger Things Indiana because Ethan Hawke happens to have been born on November 6. But that purely coincidental link isn’t his only connection with the series, not when his daughter Maya has been one of the show’s bright lights ever since her character Robin arrived in the Starcourt Mall ice cream parlor. After observing that “the greatest joy in the series at this stage comes from the way it’s evolved into a hangout sitcom with periodic monster attacks,” Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall notes that Maya Hawke “effortlessly steals every scene she’s in.”

And speaking of bright lights, every time I look at our little Christmas tree I see Winona Ryder as Will’s mother frantically creating a wall of colored bulbs meant to communicate with her son in the Upside Down. Right now, I’m waiting for the New Year’s Eve series and season finale, which I hope will be as strong as Episode 6 (“Escape from Camazotz”), starring Sadie Sink’s Max and Nell Fisher’s Holly, with intimations of Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill” in the background.

Dylan in New York

I often find what I’m looking for in Bob Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles Volume One. Now, when I need an image of Times Square at night in the early Sixties, here it is on the cover, and early in the book, just after Dylan’s January 1961 arrival in “dead-on winter,” the “falsetto-speaking” singer Tiny Tim (Dickens lives) tells him that sometimes he plays at a place in Times Square called Hubert’s Flea Circus Museum. With the New Year looming, however, I was surprised to find Dylan’s recollections of the holiday season in Minnesota brought forth by a line from Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound On My Trail” (“If today were Christmas Eve and tomorrow were Christmas Day”): “I could feel that in my bones,” Dylan writes, “that particular yuletide time of year. On the Iron Range it had been positively Dickensian. Just like the picture books: angels on Christmas trees, horse-drawn sleighs pushing through snowy streets, pine trees glistening with lights, wreaths strung over downtown stores, Salvation Army band playing on the corner, choirs going from house to house caroling, fireplaces blazing, wooly scarves around your neck, church bells ringing.”

Why is a blues singer thinking of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in a song called “Hellhound On My Trail”? Because he’s singing to his “little sweet rider” — “Aw, wouldn’t we have a time, baby?”

Riding a Bus to 2026

As usual, my wife and I have been seeing the last week of the year through old movies, along with Stranger Things, Blue Lights (the spirit of Dickens alive and well in a Belfast police procedural), and Pluribus (will Rhea Seehorn’s romance writer Carol Sturka save the world in season 2?). Whatever you think about streaming, Amazon Prime gave us the ride we needed with a pristine print of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, the first film to sweep the top five Academy Awards. This is one of those films you may think you know too well (we’ve seen it maybe four or five times between us), yes, we remember the dynamics between Clark Gable’s brash reporter and Claudette Colbert’s stuck-up runaway heiress on her way to New York to marry a fortune-hunting cad. We remember this unlikely couple sharing tourist cabins as man and wife during the marathon bus ride and hitchhiking adventures that follow. Take my word for it, this is the great American bus ride served up by a great American director, complete with impromptu sing-alongs of “The Man On the Flying Trapeze,” including the driver, who gets so wrapped up in the fun that he drives the bus into a muddy ditch. One of the most breathtaking tracking shots in American film is the one that follows the heiress through all the complicated human activity in a trailer camp to line up behind the other women for her turn at a shower.

It’s a great film, a joy, because it has what Ethan Hawke was talking about when he described how it felt making a worthy successor like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise series with Julie Delpy. Describing Before Sunset in a May 2009 interview in The Guardian, Hawke says: “It’s its own form of cinema, it’s its own entity…. it’s all about nuance…. There’s no beginning, middle and end, it’s completely fluid, just chasing the nuance of life, and kind of believing whatever God is lives in this kind of energy that flows between all of us.” In another, earlier Guardian interview, Hawke quotes Richard Linklater to the effect that Before Sunrise is about “what it’s like to connect with another human being. And how, when you actually connect with another human being, it feels like a miracle.”