Blue Moon Film Critique: Ethan Hawke's Performance Delivers in Director Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Broadway Breakup Drama

Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a performance double act is a risky business. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in stature – but is also sometimes shot placed in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, undependability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The picture imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, hating its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Even before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! company to show up for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to praise Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his ego in the appearance of a brief assignment composing fresh songs for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in traditional style listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie tells us about something rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the awful convergence between career and love defeat. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who will write the tunes?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, 14 November in the Britain and on 29 January in the land down under.