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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a performance partnership is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in stature – but is also occasionally filmed placed in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the film tells us about an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who would create the songs?

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