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Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a showbiz duo is a risky affair. Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and profoundly melancholic intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times recorded standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Prior to the interval, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the tunes?

Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is released on October 17 in the United States, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in Australia.