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Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a entertainment double act is a hazardous endeavor. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the movie envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the films: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is available on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.