🔗 Share this article

Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a performance duo is a risky endeavor. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes shot standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a hit when he views it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the break, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the form of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the songs?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the USA, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in Australia.