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Breaking up from the better-known partner in a entertainment duo is a risky endeavor. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also occasionally filmed placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous New York theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The film conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Prior to the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the tunes?

Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the Australian continent.