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Breaking up from the more famous collaborator in a performance duo is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally filmed positioned in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary musical theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the pub at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the songs?

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