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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a entertainment duo is a risky endeavor. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes filmed standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the film envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor infrequently explored in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the numbers?

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