Blue Moon Film Analysis: Ethan Hawke Delivers in Richard Linklater's Poignant Broadway Split Story

Separating from the more prominent colleague in a performance double act is a dangerous endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in stature – but is also at times filmed standing in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart's humorous takes on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the non-queer character invented for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Weiland, portrayed in this film with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The film imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure.

Even before the interval, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and makes his way to the bar at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie occurs, and anticipates the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With polished control, Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in conventional manner hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley plays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie tells us about a factor seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who shall compose the songs?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on October 17 in the US, November 14 in the UK and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.