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Breaking up from the more famous partner in a entertainment double act is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable account of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the performance continues, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the break, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of a factor seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

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