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Breaking up from the more prominent partner in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous affair. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally filmed positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor infrequently explored in films about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the tunes?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the United States, the 14th of November in the Britain and on January 29 in Australia.