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Parting ways from the better-known partner in a showbiz double act is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable account of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes shot placed in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Prior to the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in hearing about these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

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