🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the more prominent partner in a performance partnership is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in height – but is also at times recorded standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, observing with envious despair as the performance continues, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the world couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. However at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

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