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Separating from the more famous colleague in a performance duo is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also occasionally shot positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film clearly contrasts his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor rarely touched on in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the US, the 14th of November in the UK and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.