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Parting ways from the more famous colleague in a performance duo is a risky endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes filmed positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary Broadway composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, detesting the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to show up for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his pride in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in standard fashion hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in films about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who would create the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the USA, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in Australia.