🔗 Share this article

Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a showbiz double act is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in stature – but is also occasionally shot standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this film skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous musical theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, undependability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, detesting the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the film imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture reveals to us a factor rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who would create the tunes?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the US, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in the land down under.