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Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz duo is a risky business. Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in size – but is also at times filmed standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like 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, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about a factor rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

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