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Separating from the more famous partner in a performance duo is a risky business. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in stature – but is also sometimes shot standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his ego in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her experiences with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about a factor infrequently explored in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who will write the songs?

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