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Separating from the more prominent partner in a showbiz duo is a risky business. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in stature – but is also at times recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation 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 feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us something rarely touched on in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the US, the 14th of November in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.