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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a performance partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture conceives the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us something rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

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