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Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz duo is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, undependability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in films about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, November 14 in the UK and on January 29 in Australia.