🔗 Share this article

Separating from the more famous partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to show up for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the appearance of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie imagines Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in listening to these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the numbers?

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