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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a performance double act is a risky business. Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in size – but is also occasionally shot placed in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the break, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands 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 the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in conventional manner hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us something infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is available on 17 October in the United States, November 14 in the UK and on January 29 in the land down under.