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Separating from the more prominent partner in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous endeavor. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in stature – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary Broadway composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the break, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor infrequently explored in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

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