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Separating from the more famous collaborator in a entertainment duo is a risky business. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also at times shot standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the 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 protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night NYC crowd in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a success when he watches it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Even before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the form of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about something seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, 14 November in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.