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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a performance double act is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the form of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of something seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the US, the 14th of November in the UK and on January 29 in the Australian continent.