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Breaking up from the better-known partner in a entertainment duo is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in size – but is also occasionally shot standing in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes 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 further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film tells us about something seldom addressed in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who will write the numbers?

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