Blue Moon Film Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Delivers in Richard Linklater's Poignant Showbiz Breakup Drama

Breaking up from the better-known colleague in a showbiz partnership is a risky affair. Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and deeply sorrowful intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his separation from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally shrunk in height – but is also sometimes shot standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at taller characters, facing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie skillfully juxtaposes his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz 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 frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the production unfolds, hating its mild sappiness, hating the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into defeat.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at the establishment Sardi's where the balance of the picture unfolds, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their post-show celebration. He realizes it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the concept for his kids' story the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her adventures with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in hearing about these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the movie informs us of something infrequently explored in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the numbers?

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