🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz double act is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also at times shot placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned musical theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the break, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in films about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who would create the songs?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is out on 17 October in the USA, the 14th of November in the UK and on 29 January in the Australian continent.