🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a performance duo is a dangerous affair. Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The film conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, hating its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a hit when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture occurs, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With polished control, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the guise of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the United States, the 14th of November in the UK and on 29 January in the land down under.