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Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a entertainment double act is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this humorous and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times shot standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with the character's witty comments on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of dual attraction from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous New York theater composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to create the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, despising its mild sappiness, abhorring the exclamation point at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Even before the break, Lorenz Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his performance responsibility to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his kids' story Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the film envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who desires Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can disclose her adventures with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart partly takes spectator's delight in listening to these guys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture informs us of something seldom addressed in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the tunes?

The film Blue Moon screened at the London film festival; it is released on the 17th of October in the US, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in Australia.