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Breaking up from the more famous colleague in a performance duo is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor infrequently explored in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who will write the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.