Blue Moon Film Analysis: The Actor Ethan Hawke Delivers in Director Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Split Story

Breaking up from the more prominent collaborator in a entertainment duo is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and helmer Richard Linklater narrates the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also at times shot standing in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke gets large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Hart is complex: this film clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart's correspondence to his protege: youthful Yale attendee and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous Broadway composing duo with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose Oklahoma! and then a multitude of live and cinematic successes.

Psychological Complexity

The picture envisions the profoundly saddened Hart in the show Oklahoma!'s first-night New York audience in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, loathing its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He knows a success when he views it – and senses himself falling into failure.

Before the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the bar at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a brief assignment creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the barkeeper who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery
• Actor Patrick Kennedy acts as author EB White, to whom Hart unintentionally offers the notion for his kids' story the book Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the picture envisions Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Standout Roles

Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the film informs us of a factor rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the movies: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who shall compose the songs?

The film Blue Moon was shown at the London cinema festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, 14 November in the United Kingdom and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.