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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a showbiz double act is a risky business. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture effectively triangulates his gayness with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor rarely touched on in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the Britain and on 29 January in the land down under.