🔗 Share this article

Separating from the better-known partner in a performance duo is a risky endeavor. Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes shot standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness 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-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary New York theater songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a smash when he views it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the guise of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wishes Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in listening to these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who will write the songs?

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