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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a showbiz partnership is a risky endeavor. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes recorded placed in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a success when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the tunes?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in Australia.