Blue Moon Analysis: The Actor Ethan Hawke Shines in Director Richard Linklater's Poignant Showbiz Split Story

Breaking up from the better-known collaborator in a entertainment double act is a risky business. Larry David experienced it. So did Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this witty and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from screenwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater recounts the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from composer Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly technologically minimized in height – but is also occasionally shot standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, addressing Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the small-statured artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Complex Character and Motifs

Hawke achieves large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The orientation of Hart is multifaceted: this picture clearly contrasts his queer identity with the heterosexual image invented for him in the 1948 theater piece the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his young apprentice: young Yale student and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the renowned New York theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and teamed up with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night NYC crowd in the year 1943, observing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, hating its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and senses himself falling into failure.

Even before the break, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture occurs, and expects the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to show up for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to praise Richard Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, actor Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is the lyricist's shame; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their ongoing performance A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in conventional manner hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture conceives Hart to be intricately and masochistically in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the world can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a youthful female who desires Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Performance Highlights

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in hearing about these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film tells us about something infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the films: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. However at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the USA, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in Australia.