Blue Moon Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Excels in Director Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Split Story

Breaking up from the more prominent partner in a performance duo is a risky endeavor. Comedian Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times filmed standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 theater piece the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, undependability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie imagines the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, abhorring the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the guise of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the universe can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about something infrequently explored in movies about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is available on October 17 in the USA, November 14 in the United Kingdom and on 29 January in the land down under.