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Separating from the more prominent colleague in a performance duo is a dangerous affair. Larry David went through it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally recorded placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at taller characters, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Prior to the interval, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the guise of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us something rarely touched on in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who would create the songs?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the Britain and on January 29 in the land down under.