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Parting ways from the better-known colleague in a performance double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally recorded placed in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at more statuesque figures, facing the lyricist's stature problem as José Ferrer in the past acted the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Elements

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned musical theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The movie envisions the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to feign all is well. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film informs us of something seldom addressed in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: 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 may turn into a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the Australian continent.