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Parting ways from the more famous colleague in a entertainment double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally shot placed in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night NYC crowd in the year 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Prior to the break, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the pub at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his ego in the appearance of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about something rarely touched on in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in Australia.