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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a showbiz duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally recorded placed in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with envious despair as the show proceeds, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us a factor rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who will write the numbers?

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