🔗 Share this article

Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a entertainment partnership is a dangerous business. Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a smash when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, 14 November in the Britain and on January 29 in the land down under.