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Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a performance duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in stature – but is also at times filmed placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Prior to the interval, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to feign all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the Britain and on 29 January in the land down under.