Blue Moon Film Review: The Actor Ethan Hawke Delivers in Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Breakup Drama

Breaking up from the more famous partner in a entertainment duo is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally filmed positioned in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at heightened personas, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous New York theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He understands a success when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Even before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who desires Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her experiences with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at some level, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who would create the songs?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is released on 17 October in the United States, November 14 in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.