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Breaking up from the more prominent partner in a entertainment partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also at times recorded placed in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary musical theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Even before the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and goes to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about an aspect infrequently explored in films about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the United States, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.