🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz partnership is a risky endeavor. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in stature – but is also at times shot positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the break, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job writing new numbers for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in hearing about these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the songs?

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