🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more famous colleague in a entertainment partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in height – but is also at times recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Prior to the break, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his pride in the form of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor rarely touched on in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who would create the tunes?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is available on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.