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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a entertainment partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in size – but is also occasionally filmed placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the form of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film tells us about an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. However at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.