🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz double act is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes shot placed in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He knows a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. 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 temporary job creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the film imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture reveals to us something seldom addressed in films about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who will write the tunes?

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