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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a showbiz duo is a hazardous business. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also at times recorded placed in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The film envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his pride in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the picture conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who would create the songs?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the US, 14 November in the UK and on the 29th of January in the land down under.