🔗 Share this article Blue Moon Movie Critique: Ethan Hawke's Performance Excels in Richard Linklater's Bitter Showbiz Split Story Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a performance duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing tale of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with theatrical excellence, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally shrunk in stature – but is also occasionally filmed positioned in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at more statuesque figures, addressing Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer once played the small-statured Toulouse-Lautrec. Multifaceted Role and Elements Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the subtle queer themes of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he recently attended, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he bitingly labels it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this film skillfully juxtaposes his homosexuality with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his protege: college student at Yale and aspiring set designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by Margaret Qualley. As part of the famous New York theater songwriting team with the composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for incomparable songs like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the number Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the titular Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, undependability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers severed ties with him and joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical Oklahoma! and then a multitude of theater and film hits. Psychological Complexity The picture conceives the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere Manhattan spectators in 1943, gazing with jealous anguish as the show proceeds, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation point at the conclusion of the name, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into failure. Even before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the tavern at the venue Sardi's where the remainder of the movie takes place, and waits for the (certainly) victorious Oklahoma! troupe to arrive for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his performance responsibility to compliment Richard Rodgers, to feign all is well. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott acts as Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what each understands is Hart's embarrassment; he gives a pacifier to his ego in the form of a temporary job writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation. The performer Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of acerbic misery Patrick Kennedy acts as writer EB White, to whom Hart inadvertently provides the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little Margaret Qualley portrays Elizabeth Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the film imagines Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in adoration Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Undoubtedly the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her adventures with guys – as well of course the theater industry influencer who can promote her occupation. Performance Highlights Hawke demonstrates that Hart to a degree enjoys observational satisfaction in learning of these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of an aspect seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at one stage, Lorenz Hart is rebelliously conscious that what he has achieved will endure. It's an outstanding portrayal from Ethan Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who shall compose the numbers? Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on October 17 in the United States, 14 November in the Britain and on January 29 in the Australian continent.