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Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a entertainment partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in stature – but is also sometimes recorded placed in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Hart is complicated: this picture clearly contrasts his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the intermission, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl 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 Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who shall compose the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the USA, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.