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Separating from the more famous collaborator in a entertainment duo is a risky business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary Broadway composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie envisions the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He knows a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in listening to these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us something infrequently explored in films about the world of musical theatre or the films: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Yet at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the USA, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the Australian continent.