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Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment partnership is a hazardous business. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at taller characters, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this picture clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, detesting the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film informs us of something rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the tunes?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in the Australian continent.