🔗 Share this article

Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a showbiz partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also at times shot positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at taller characters, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complex: this film skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Even before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their after-party. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to praise Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in conventional manner hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her experiences with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the picture informs us of an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is released on October 17 in the USA, November 14 in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.