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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally filmed placed in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protégée: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who will write the numbers?

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