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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a entertainment duo is a dangerous business. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes filmed standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The film envisions the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Even before the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Lorenz 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.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in hearing about these boys 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 career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is out on October 17 in the US, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.