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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a entertainment double act is a hazardous business. Larry David went through it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway 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 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 more statuesque figures, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in listening to these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, the 14th of November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in Australia.