Blue Moon Film Review: Ethan Hawke Delivers in Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Broadway Split Story

Separating from the more prominent collaborator in a performance partnership is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in size – but is also at times shot positioned in an unseen pit to look up poignantly at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Emotional Depth

The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the appearance of a temporary job creating additional tunes for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Yet at a certain point, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the numbers?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is available on 17 October in the US, the 14th of November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.