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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this picture clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a smash when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the United States, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in Australia.