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Separating from the more famous collaborator in a entertainment double act is a risky endeavor. Larry David did it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad intimate film from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the nearly intolerable account of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes shot positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart's height issue as José Ferrer once played the diminutive artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Layered Persona and Themes

Hawke earns large, cynical chuckles with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the film Casablanca and the excessively cheerful musical he recently attended, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-homo. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this film effectively triangulates his homosexuality with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for unparalleled tunes like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with the lyricist's addiction, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create Oklahoma! and then a series of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The film conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its mild sappiness, detesting the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how lethally effective it is. He realizes a smash when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Before the break, Hart miserably ducks out and goes to the tavern at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and expects the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! cast to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to act as if everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his pride in the guise of a temporary job composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in traditional style listens sympathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays author EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his kids' story Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley acts as Elizabeth Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Ivy League pupil with whom the picture imagines Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the universe couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a youthful female who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her exploits with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke shows that Hart somewhat derives spectator's delight in learning of these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the film reveals to us an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Yet at a certain point, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has attained will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the tunes?

The movie Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is out on 17 October in the US, 14 November in the Britain and on 29 January in Australia.