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Breaking up from the more famous collaborator in a showbiz duo is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes shot placed in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character 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 dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protégée: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

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