Parting ways from the better-known partner in a performance partnership is a risky affair. Comedian Larry David did it. The same for Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from writer the writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable account of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his split from composer Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an notable toupee and artificial shortness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in size – but is also at times filmed standing in an off-camera hole to stare up wistfully at heightened personas, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite Toulouse-Lautrec.
Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he just watched, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his queer identity with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 stage show the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney acting as Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist the character Elizabeth Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by actress Margaret Qualley.
As part of the renowned musical theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was responsible for unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course Blue Moon. But frustrated by Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Rodgers ended their partnership and partnered with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! and then a raft of live and cinematic successes.
The movie envisions the deeply depressed Hart in the musical Oklahoma!'s premiere New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, loathing its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a smash when he watches it – and senses himself falling into defeat.
Before the break, Lorenz Hart sadly slips away and goes to the pub at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture takes place, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to arrive for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his performance responsibility to compliment Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, actor Andrew Scott portrays Richard Rodgers, evidently ashamed at what both are aware is Hart's embarrassment; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the appearance of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production the show A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.
Lorenz Hart has previously been abandoned by Rodgers. Surely the world can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley mercilessly depicts a young woman who wishes Hart to be the chuckling, non-sexual confidant to whom she can reveal her exploits with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can promote her occupation.
Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these young men but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the film informs us of a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the awful convergence between professional and romantic failure. Yet at one stage, Lorenz Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Hawke. This might become a theater production – but who would create the numbers?
Blue Moon premiered at the London film festival; it is out on the 17th of October in the US, the 14th of November in the UK and on 29 January in the Australian continent.
