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Separating from the more prominent colleague in a entertainment double act is a risky business. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this film clearly contrasts his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the movie conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the United States, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.