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Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz partnership is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also at times shot standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary musical theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture informs us of an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the tunes?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in the Australian continent.