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Parting ways from the more famous partner in a showbiz double act is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist the 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 shrunk in height – but is also sometimes filmed positioned in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the intermission, Hart unhappily departs and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Lorenz 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 promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of something rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

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