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Breaking up from the better-known partner in a performance duo is a risky business. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in size – but is also at times shot placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture clearly contrasts his queer identity with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary musical theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in listening to these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in the land down under.