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Separating from the better-known partner in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also at times filmed placed in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is complicated: this film skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, undependability and gloomy fits, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the universe couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us something rarely touched on in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will persist. 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 film festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the US, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in Australia.