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Separating from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz double act is a dangerous endeavor. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wishes Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in learning of these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who will write the numbers?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the USA, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.