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Breaking up from the more famous partner in a entertainment partnership is a risky affair. Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also at times recorded positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The movie conceives the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the performance continues, loathing its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation point at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He understands a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie occurs, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his pride in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the idea for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us something infrequently explored in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between career and love defeat. However 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 stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the US, 14 November in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.