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Parting ways from the more famous collaborator in a performance duo is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times shot placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their after-party. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film tells us about a factor seldom addressed in movies about the world of musical theatre or the films: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

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