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Separating from the more prominent partner in a showbiz partnership is a risky affair. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie clearly contrasts his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its mild sappiness, detesting the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He knows a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the form of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, the 14th of November in the UK and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.