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Parting ways from the more famous colleague in a entertainment duo is a risky affair. Larry David experienced it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee 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 songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the movie conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us something seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who will write the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is available on 17 October in the USA, November 14 in the UK and on 29 January in the land down under.