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Breaking up from the more prominent partner in a entertainment duo is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in size – but is also at times recorded positioned in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the film informs us of an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the US, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in Australia.