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Separating from the more prominent partner in a performance duo is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times recorded placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his gayness with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the song 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, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of something infrequently explored in films about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the United States, 14 November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.