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Separating from the better-known partner in a entertainment double act is a hazardous endeavor. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes filmed placed in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The film envisions the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to feign all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the guise of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. However at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.