Blue Moon Review: The Actor Ethan Hawke Delivers in Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Showbiz Split Story

Separating from the better-known collaborator in a performance duo is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing tale of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally reduced in height – but is also at times recorded standing in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s premiere NYC crowd in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the picture envisions Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie informs us of an aspect rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who would create the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in Australia.