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Separating from the better-known partner in a performance duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also at times recorded placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture tells us about something seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, 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 will write the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on October 17 in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.