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Separating from the more famous collaborator in a performance partnership is a hazardous affair. Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in stature – but is also at times recorded standing in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He knows a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the interval, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the film envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in Australia.