Blue Moon Movie Review: Ethan Hawke's Performance Excels in Richard Linklater's Poignant Showbiz Split Story

Parting ways from the better-known collaborator in a performance duo is a dangerous affair. Comedian Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this clever and profoundly melancholic chamber piece from scriptwriter the writer Robert Kaplow and helmer the director Richard Linklater recounts the almost agonizing account of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart right after his separation from Richard Rodgers. His role is portrayed with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is regularly digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally recorded positioned in an hidden depression to look up poignantly at heightened personas, addressing the lyricist's stature problem as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Motifs

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the concealed homosexuality of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this movie clearly contrasts his queer identity with the straight persona created for him in the 1948 theater piece Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexual tendency from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: college student at Yale and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, portrayed in this film with uninhibited maidenly charm by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the famous Broadway lyricist-composer pair with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But exasperated with Hart's drinking problem, inconsistency and melancholic episodes, Rodgers broke with him and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a multitude of stage and screen smashes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie envisions the severely despondent Lorenz Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, observing with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, detesting the punctuation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how extremely potent it is. He realizes a hit when he sees one – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and heads to the pub at the establishment Sardi's where the rest of the film occurs, and waits for the (unavoidably) successful Oklahoma! company to appear for their after-party. He knows it is his entertainment obligation to praise Rodgers, to feign everything is all right. With polished control, the performer Andrew Scott plays Richard Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he gives a pacifier to his self-esteem in the appearance of a brief assignment writing new numbers for their existing show the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale portrays the barman who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays Weiland, the impossibly gorgeous Yale student with whom the movie conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in adoration

Hart has earlier been rejected by Rodgers. Certainly the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a girl who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can disclose her exploits with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke reveals that Hart to a degree enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these guys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture tells us about a factor seldom addressed in pictures about the domain of theater music or the movies: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has accomplished will persist. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This may turn into a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

Blue Moon was shown at the London movie festival; it is available on October 17 in the US, the 14th of November in the Britain and on the 29th of January in the Australian continent.