🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a showbiz partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in size – but is also occasionally filmed placed in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this picture clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The movie envisions the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie envisions Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in movies about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

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