🔗 Share this article

Parting ways from the better-known partner in a showbiz duo is a dangerous endeavor. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complex: this picture clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie envisions Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in listening to these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture tells us about something seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Yet at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in Australia.