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Separating from the better-known partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the United States, November 14 in the UK and on January 29 in Australia.