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Breaking up from the more famous colleague in a performance partnership is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally shot positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to show up for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie reveals to us something seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

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