Blue Moon Review: The Actor Ethan Hawke Delivers in Director Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Broadway Split Story

Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a performance duo is a hazardous business. Larry David went through it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in stature – but is also at times recorded placed in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, undependability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a smash when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to appear for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by 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 disclose her experiences with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who will write the numbers?

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