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Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment double act is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David went through it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness 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-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to arrive for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the United States, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.