Blue Moon Movie Review: Ethan Hawke Excels in Richard Linklater's Bitter Showbiz Breakup Drama

Parting ways from the better-known partner in a entertainment double act is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and deeply sorrowful intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in stature – but is also sometimes recorded placed in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns substantial, jaded humor with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned New York theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The film envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Prior to the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his pride in the appearance of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in learning of these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie reveals to us a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a live show – but who will write the numbers?

The film Blue Moon premiered at the London movie festival; it is out on 17 October in the United States, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the Australian continent.