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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a performance partnership is a dangerous business. Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protégée: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in the year 1943, gazing with envious despair as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie occurs, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about something rarely touched on in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who shall compose the tunes?

Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the US, November 14 in the Britain and on 29 January in the land down under.