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Parting ways from the more famous colleague in a showbiz double act is a dangerous business. Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also at times filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he watches it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the United States, November 14 in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.