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Breaking up from the more famous partner in a entertainment double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David went through it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times shot placed in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned Broadway lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The film imagines the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the performance continues, despising its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation point at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

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