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Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a performance partnership is a risky business. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his queer identity with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl 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 showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about a factor seldom addressed in movies about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is released on October 17 in the US, the 14th of November in the UK and on January 29 in the land down under.