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Breaking up from the more famous collaborator in a showbiz duo is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, observing with envious despair as the performance continues, despising its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film tells us about something rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on 17 October in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on the 29th of January in the land down under.