🔗 Share this article Blue Moon Movie Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Delivers in Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Breakup Drama Separating from the better-known partner in a entertainment partnership is a dangerous affair. Larry David went through it. Likewise Andrew Ridgeley. Presently, this witty and deeply sorrowful chamber piece from writer Robert Kaplow and director the director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of musical theater lyricist Lorenz Hart right after his breakup from Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with flamboyant genius, an dreadful hairpiece and artificial shortness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in height – but is also sometimes filmed positioned in an unseen pit to gaze upward sadly at more statuesque figures, confronting Hart’s vertical challenge as actor José Ferrer once played the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec. Multifaceted Role and Motifs Hawke gets substantial, jaded humor with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the classic Casablanca and the excessively cheerful theater production he’s just been to see, with all the rope-spinning ranch hands; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Lorenz Hart is complicated: this picture clearly contrasts his gayness with the heterosexual image created for him in the 1948 musical the musical Words and Music (with actor Mickey Rooney portraying Hart); it shrewdly deduces a kind of bisexual tendency from the lyricist's writings to his protégée: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by actress Margaret Qualley. Being a member of the renowned Broadway lyricist-composer pair with musician Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like the classic The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the standard My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart’s alcoholism, inconsistency and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to compose the show Oklahoma! and then a raft of theater and film hits. Psychological Complexity The movie conceives the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s premiere New York audience in the year 1943, gazing with covetous misery as the performance continues, despising its mild sappiness, hating the exclamation mark at the conclusion of the name, but dishearteningly conscious of how devastatingly successful it is. He understands a hit when he views it – and senses himself falling into unsuccessfulness. Even before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the remainder of the movie unfolds, and anticipates the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to appear for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to praise Richard Rodgers, to pretend all is well. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott acts as Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his pride in the form of a short-term gig creating additional tunes for their existing show the show A Connecticut Yankee, which just exacerbates the situation. Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in traditional style hears compassionately to Hart's monologues of vinegary despair Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays writer EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart accidentally gives the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little Qualley acts as the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale attendee with whom the movie envisions Lorenz Hart to be complexly and self-destructively in love Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the cosmos couldn't be that harsh as to cause him to be spurned by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley pitilessly acts a young woman who wants Hart to be the laughing, platonic friend to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career. Performance Highlights Hawke reveals that Hart partly takes observational satisfaction in listening to these guys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Weiland and the picture reveals to us a factor infrequently explored in pictures about the domain of theater music or the cinema: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. Nevertheless at some level, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who would create the tunes? The movie Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is released on October 17 in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on the 29th of January in Australia.