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Breaking up from the better-known partner in a showbiz double act is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes filmed standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who will write the songs?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the United States, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.