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Separating from the better-known colleague in a performance duo is a risky business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this picture clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, hating its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the songs?

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