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Separating from the better-known collaborator in a performance double act is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also occasionally shot positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the break, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; 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 simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is released on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in Australia.