🔗 Share this article

Separating from the better-known partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this picture effectively triangulates his gayness with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us something rarely touched on in movies about the world of musical theatre or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the songs?

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