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Separating from the more famous colleague in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes filmed placed in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers 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, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film unfolds, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to feign all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film informs us of an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the USA, 14 November in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.