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Separating from the better-known colleague in a showbiz partnership is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in stature – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The picture conceives the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his pride in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wants 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 promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about an aspect rarely touched on in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the numbers?

Blue Moon was shown at the London film festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, the 14th of November in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.