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Breaking up from the more famous colleague in a entertainment partnership is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also at times recorded standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned Broadway lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his ego in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the notion for his kids' story Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the picture conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in hearing about these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor rarely touched on in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.