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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a performance duo is a risky affair. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes shot placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film tells us about a factor rarely touched on in films about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the US, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in the land down under.