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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment duo is a risky business. Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in height – but is also sometimes shot placed in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous musical theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the pub at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation 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 bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. 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 could be a live show – but who will write the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.