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Separating from the more prominent partner in a performance partnership is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes filmed standing in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie envisions the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he watches it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in listening to these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture reveals to us something seldom addressed in movies about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who would create the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.