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Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a performance partnership is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership 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 Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at a certain point, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is out on October 17 in the US, the 14th of November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.