🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more famous partner in a performance double act is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in size – but is also at times recorded placed in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a smash when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is released on October 17 in the US, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in the Australian continent.