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Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment double act is a risky business. Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also at times recorded placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Even before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the guise of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in movies about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the numbers?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is out on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.