Blue Moon Critique: Ethan Hawke's Performance Excels in Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Broadway Split Story

Breaking up from the more famous collaborator in a performance double act is a hazardous affair. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also sometimes filmed standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this film clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary New York theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture conceives the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Even before the break, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at a certain point, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who will write the numbers?

Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the United States, 14 November in the UK and on the 29th of January in the land down under.