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Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz duo is a risky business. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this movie effectively triangulates his queer identity with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the Australian continent.