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Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a performance partnership is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes shot placed in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this film effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to arrive for their after-party. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the guise of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie informs us of an aspect infrequently explored in films about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who would create the tunes?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the USA, November 14 in the UK and on 29 January in the Australian continent.