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Separating from the more prominent collaborator in a performance partnership is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this film skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to feign all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film informs us of a factor infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

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