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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz duo is a dangerous business. Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also at times filmed positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The film imagines the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a smash when he watches it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his ego in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of something rarely touched on in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who will write the tunes?

Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is available on 17 October in the US, November 14 in the Britain and on January 29 in Australia.