🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment double act is a hazardous business. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes shot placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their after-party. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us a factor infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

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