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Parting ways from the more famous collaborator in a entertainment double act is a risky endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The film envisions the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her experiences with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of something infrequently explored in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who will write the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the US, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in the land down under.