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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a entertainment partnership is a dangerous affair. Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting 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 sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Even before the break, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their after-party. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to feign all is well. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

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