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Separating from the better-known partner in a showbiz duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the world couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

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