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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz duo is a risky business. Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the movie imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us something infrequently explored in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the United States, November 14 in the UK and on the 29th of January in Australia.