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Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a showbiz partnership is a risky business. Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times filmed positioned in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist 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 excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this film skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he views it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the break, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about something rarely touched on in movies about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the United States, the 14th of November in the Britain and on 29 January in the Australian continent.