Blue Moon Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Shines in Richard Linklater's Poignant Showbiz Breakup Drama

Parting ways from the more famous partner in a performance double act is a hazardous business. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic intimate film from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in height – but is also sometimes recorded standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the severely despondent Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the exclamation point at the end of the title, 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 break, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the pub at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the picture conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film tells us about something seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is out on 17 October in the USA, November 14 in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.