🔗 Share this article

Parting ways from the better-known partner in a performance double act is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and deeply sorrowful small-scale drama from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times shot standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this film clearly contrasts his queer identity with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s opening night NYC crowd in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the pub at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie informs us of something infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who would create the numbers?

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