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Separating from the better-known colleague in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture conceives the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its insipid emotionality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Prior to the interval, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his pride in the guise of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie imagines Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor rarely touched on in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

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