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Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a showbiz double act is a dangerous business. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also at times recorded standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his pride in the form of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the film reveals to us a factor infrequently explored in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the songs?

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