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Separating from the more prominent colleague in a performance partnership is a risky affair. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also sometimes shot placed in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the film informs us of something infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who will write the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is released on 17 October in the United States, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in Australia.