Blue Moon Movie Review: The Actor Ethan Hawke Shines in Director Richard Linklater's Poignant Broadway Split Story

Separating from the more famous collaborator in a performance double act is a hazardous business. Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and deeply sorrowful intimate film from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater narrates the nearly intolerable account of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in stature – but is also occasionally recorded standing in an hidden depression to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer in the past acted the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of dual attraction from Hart's correspondence to his protégée: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the legendary musical theater lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for incomparable songs like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits.

Emotional Depth

The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, looking on with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, loathing its bland sentimentality, detesting the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how extremely potent it is. He understands a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the bar at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their following-event gathering. He realizes it is his entertainment obligation to compliment Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what both are aware is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• The performer Bobby Cannavale portrays the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his children’s book the book Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love

Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Certainly the world wouldn't be that brutal as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her experiences with boys – as well of course the showbiz connection who can promote her occupation.

Performance Highlights

Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film tells us about a factor infrequently explored in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between professional and romantic failure. Yet at a certain point, Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This may turn into a theater production – but who shall compose the numbers?

The movie Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the US, 14 November in the UK and on 29 January in the land down under.