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Separating from the better-known colleague in a entertainment duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the form of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately 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 book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the picture informs us of something infrequently explored in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is available on 17 October in the US, November 14 in the UK and on January 29 in the Australian continent.