🔗 Share this article

Separating from the more famous collaborator in a entertainment double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in height – but is also at times filmed placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture clearly contrasts his queer identity with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary New York theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and gloomy fits, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation point at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the picture informs us of an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. However at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is out on 17 October in the United States, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.