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Breaking up from the more prominent partner in a performance double act is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times filmed positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, 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 queer identity with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and gloomy fits, Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night NYC crowd in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the intermission, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about a factor seldom addressed in films about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: 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 an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the USA, November 14 in the Britain and on 29 January in the land down under.