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Separating from the better-known partner in a performance partnership is a risky endeavor. Comedian Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his kids' story Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her experiences with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who would create the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, November 14 in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.