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Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a showbiz double act is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes filmed positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, confronting the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Even before the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his pride in the form of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is available on 17 October in the US, November 14 in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the land down under.