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Separating from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment duo is a hazardous endeavor. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes filmed standing in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and gloomy fits, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its mild sappiness, detesting the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his ego in the guise of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the film conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on 29 January in the Australian continent.