Blue Moon Review: The Actor Ethan Hawke Excels in Director Richard Linklater's Heartbreaking Showbiz Split Story

Parting ways from the more prominent collaborator in a showbiz partnership is a hazardous endeavor. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable tale of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times recorded placed in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protege: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Weiland, acted in this movie with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous musical theater lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Sentimental Layers

The movie envisions the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s opening night New York audience in 1943, observing with envious despair as the production unfolds, loathing its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie occurs, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in traditional style attends empathetically to Hart's monologues of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who desires Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart somewhat derives observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the movie tells us about something rarely touched on in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who will write the songs?

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