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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a entertainment duo is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his ego in the guise of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who will write the numbers?

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