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Breaking up from the more famous colleague in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The film envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he views it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Prior to the break, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the picture conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the tunes?

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