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

Separating from the more famous partner in a entertainment double act is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David went through it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing story of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times recorded standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film clearly contrasts his queer identity with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous musical theater lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The film conceives the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, despising its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He understands a success when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the intermission, Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their after-party. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what both are aware 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 the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the world couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her exploits with young men – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of something infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who would create the numbers?

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