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Separating from the more prominent collaborator in a entertainment double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David went through it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also at times recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the interval, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about something seldom addressed in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, November 14 in the Britain and on January 29 in the land down under.