Blue Moon Movie Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Shines in Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Split Story

Parting ways from the more prominent colleague in a showbiz partnership is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing account of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and simulated diminutiveness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often technologically minimized in size – but is also occasionally recorded placed in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Themes

Hawke earns big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat stage show he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney acting as Lorenz Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer the character Elizabeth Weiland, played here with uninhibited maidenly charm by actress Margaret Qualley.

Being a member of the famous New York theater composing duo with composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But frustrated by the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and depressive outbursts, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The movie envisions the deeply depressed Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere Manhattan spectators in the year 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the production unfolds, hating its bland sentimentality, abhorring the punctuation mark at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He understands a smash when he watches it – and feels himself descending into defeat.

Before the interval, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to compliment Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what each understands is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his ego in the guise of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of bitter despondency
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy portrays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his youth literature the book Stuart Little
• Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the picture imagines Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Certainly the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – 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 young men but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in pictures about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at a certain point, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has attained will persist. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a theater production – but who shall compose the tunes?

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