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Parting ways from the more famous collaborator in a entertainment duo is a risky endeavor. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes filmed placed in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, detesting the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about something seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.