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Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a entertainment duo is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the performance continues, loathing its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her experiences with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of something seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is out on 17 October in the USA, 14 November in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.