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Separating from the better-known colleague in a showbiz double act is a hazardous business. Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also at times recorded standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this film skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned New York theater songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, detesting the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, the 14th of November in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.