🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more famous collaborator in a showbiz double act is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes shot standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for 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, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The film conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to arrive for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in listening to these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the tunes?

Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the land down under.