Blue Moon Movie Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Delivers in Director Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Breakup Drama

Separating from the more famous partner in a entertainment partnership is a hazardous affair. Comedian Larry David went through it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from scriptwriter Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater narrates the almost agonizing story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in height – but is also at times shot positioned in an hidden depression to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the movie Casablanca and the overly optimistic theater production he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is multifaceted: this picture clearly contrasts his queer identity with the straight persona fabricated for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Hart was in charge of matchless numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, undependability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the musical Oklahoma! and then a series of theater and film hits.

Psychological Complexity

The film imagines the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, hating the punctuation mark at the finish of the heading, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film occurs, and anticipates the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to compliment Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale acts as the bartender who in conventional manner attends empathetically to the character's soliloquies of vinegary despair
• The thespian Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the notion for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• The actress Qualley portrays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie conceives Lorenz Hart to be intricately and masochistically in adoration

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who desires Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can disclose her exploits with guys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of an aspect rarely touched on in films about the domain of theater music or the films: the dreadful intersection between career and love defeat. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has accomplished will survive. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This might become a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

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