Blue Moon Review: Ethan Hawke's Performance Shines in Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Split Story

Breaking up from the more famous colleague in a performance double act is a risky endeavor. Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful intimate film from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable story of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in size – but is also sometimes recorded positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Motifs

Hawke achieves substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and perceives himself sinking into unsuccessfulness.

Before the interval, Hart unhappily departs and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the appearance of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale attendee with whom the film imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the movie informs us of something infrequently explored in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap 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 terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

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