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Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a entertainment partnership is a risky business. Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally shot placed in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the break, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who will write the tunes?

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