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Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film conceives the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us something seldom addressed in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who shall compose the tunes?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the US, 14 November in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.