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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a showbiz duo is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times shot 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 diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes 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.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who will write the numbers?

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