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Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also at times filmed standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned Broadway composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the movie envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor rarely touched on in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who will write the numbers?

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