🔗 Share this article

Separating from the better-known partner in a entertainment double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also at times recorded standing in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protege: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie envisions the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about something infrequently explored in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who would create the songs?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the USA, November 14 in the Britain and on the 29th of January in Australia.