🔗 Share this article

Separating from the better-known partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Comedian Larry David experienced it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, loathing its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation point at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie tells us about an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers?

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