🔗 Share this article

Separating from the more famous colleague in a performance duo is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times filmed standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved 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 Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the picture informs us of something seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will persist. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the songs?

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