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Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a performance partnership is a risky endeavor. Larry David experienced it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at heightened personas, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of an aspect rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the UK and on 29 January in the Australian continent.