Blue Moon Film Analysis: The Actor Ethan Hawke Excels in Richard Linklater's Poignant Showbiz Breakup Drama

Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment duo is a risky endeavor. Larry David experienced it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the all but unbearable account of musical theater lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an unspeakable combover and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in height – but is also at times filmed placed in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexual identity of Hart is multifaceted: this picture skillfully juxtaposes his queer identity with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: youthful Yale attendee and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the show proceeds, loathing its mild sappiness, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to show up for their following-event gathering. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to pretend things are fine. With smooth moderation, the performer Andrew Scott acts as 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 writing new numbers for their ongoing performance the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Patrick Kennedy plays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the notion for his children’s book the novel Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the picture conceives Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a girl who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie informs us of an aspect seldom addressed in movies about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who will write the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon premiered at the London cinema festival; it is out on 17 October in the United States, November 14 in the UK and on 29 January in Australia.