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Separating from the better-known partner in a entertainment duo is a risky endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally shot positioned in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his protégée: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway composing duo with composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie envisions the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the performance continues, hating its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a hit when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Even before the interval, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the film conceives Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in affection

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the film tells us about something seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the tunes?

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