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Parting ways from the more famous collaborator in a performance double act is a dangerous affair. Larry David experienced it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her experiences with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie reveals to us something seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the tunes?

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