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Parting ways from the more famous colleague in a showbiz partnership is a hazardous business. Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes filmed placed in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The film envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the break, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of an aspect infrequently explored in films about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is released on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.