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Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a entertainment partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in height – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The movie imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Even before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film informs us of something seldom addressed in films about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the songs?

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