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Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a performance duo is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes recorded placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs 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 acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with envious despair as the performance continues, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us something seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the numbers?

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