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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a showbiz duo is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the film envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of something seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who would create the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on 17 October in the United States, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the land down under.