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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous affair. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The movie imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with envious despair as the performance continues, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Even before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in listening to these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in the land down under.