Blue Moon Analysis: The Actor Ethan Hawke Delivers in Richard Linklater's Bitter Showbiz Breakup Drama

Breaking up from the better-known partner in a performance duo is a dangerous endeavor. Comedian Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in stature – but is also at times shot positioned in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he just watched, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Hart is multifaceted: this movie clearly contrasts his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the production unfolds, loathing its mild sappiness, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and feels himself descending into failure.

Before the intermission, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to arrive for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, the performer Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his ego in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his youth literature Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her experiences with boys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Performance Highlights

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect infrequently explored in movies about the domain of theater music or the movies: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. However at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a stage musical – but who will write the tunes?

Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is out on 17 October in the United States, November 14 in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.