🔗 Share this article

Breaking up from the better-known partner in a performance partnership is a risky endeavor. Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable account of musical theater 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 technologically minimized in size – but is also at times filmed positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film conceives the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the performance continues, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a smash when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the form of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Surely the world wouldn't be that brutal as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who would create the numbers?

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 United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in Australia.