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Parting ways from the more famous collaborator in a showbiz partnership is a hazardous affair. Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the performance continues, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know 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 musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wishes Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the songs?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the US, the 14th of November in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.