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Parting ways from the more prominent partner in a performance double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who would create the tunes?

Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in the Australian continent.