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Breaking up from the better-known partner in a showbiz duo is a dangerous affair. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He knows a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wishes 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.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie reveals to us something infrequently explored in films about the world of musical theatre or the films: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the tunes?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is out on 17 October in the United States, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in Australia.