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Breaking up from the more famous partner in a showbiz duo is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her experiences with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who will write the numbers?

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