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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a performance partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes shot placed in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this film 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 shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Prior to the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who would create the tunes?

Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the United States, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in the land down under.