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Separating from the better-known colleague in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about something rarely touched on in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

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