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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a performance double act is a risky endeavor. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also at times shot standing in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protege: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The film envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes 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 advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie tells us about an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the songs?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on October 17 in the US, 14 November in the UK and on 29 January in the Australian continent.