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Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a performance duo is a risky business. Larry David went through it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the movie 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 Hart is complicated: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the performance continues, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his pride in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who would create the tunes?

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