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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a showbiz double act is a risky business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at taller characters, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protégée: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, undependability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor rarely touched on in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

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