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Separating from the more famous partner in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous business. Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture clearly contrasts his queer identity with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous musical theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation point at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in conventional manner hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor rarely touched on in films about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at a certain point, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the songs?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on 29 January in the land down under.