Blue Moon Film Analysis: Ethan Hawke Excels in Director Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Broadway Split Story

Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz double act is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in size – but is also sometimes recorded placed in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He knows a smash when he views it – and perceives himself sinking into failure.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he offers a sop to his ego in the form of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in conventional manner listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world couldn't be that harsh as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie tells us about an aspect infrequently explored in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

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