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Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a entertainment double act is a hazardous business. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in stature – but is also at times filmed standing in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his ego in the appearance of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in hearing about these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor rarely touched on in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the US, November 14 in the UK and on 29 January in the Australian continent.