Blue Moon Movie Analysis: Ethan Hawke's Performance Shines in Director Richard Linklater's Bitter Broadway Split Story

Breaking up from the more prominent colleague in a performance duo is a dangerous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. Likewise Musician Andrew Ridgeley. Currently, this humorous and profoundly melancholic small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and filmmaker Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with theatrical excellence, an notable toupee and simulated diminutiveness by Ethan Hawke, who is frequently technologically minimized in stature – but is also at times shot standing in an off-camera hole to gaze upward sadly at taller characters, addressing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer in the past acted the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with Hart's humorous takes on the concealed homosexuality of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic stage show he just watched, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he sarcastically dubs it Okla-queer. The orientation of Hart is complex: this movie effectively triangulates his queer identity with the non-queer character created for him in the 1948 stage show the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it intelligently infers a kind of bisexuality from Hart's correspondence to his protege: college student at Yale and budding theater artist Elizabeth Weiland, played here with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As part of the legendary New York theater composing duo with the composer Rodgers, Lorenz Hart was in charge of unparalleled tunes like The Lady Is a Tramp, Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at Hart's drinking problem, unreliability and gloomy fits, Richard Rodgers broke with him and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Sentimental Layers

The movie imagines the severely despondent Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, looking on with covetous misery as the show proceeds, despising its insipid emotionality, detesting the exclamation mark at the finish of the heading, but heartsinkingly aware of how devastatingly successful it is. He realizes a success when he sees one – and feels himself descending into unsuccessfulness.

Prior to the break, Lorenz Hart unhappily departs and makes his way to the pub at the venue Sardi's where the rest of the film unfolds, and expects the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! troupe to show up for their following-event gathering. He is aware it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Richard Rodgers, to act as if all is well. With smooth moderation, actor Andrew Scott portrays Rodgers, obviously uncomfortable at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he provides a consolation to his self-esteem in the guise of a temporary job writing new numbers for their current production A Connecticut Yankee, which simply intensifies the pain.

• Bobby Cannavale plays the barkeeper who in conventional manner attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Patrick Kennedy acts as EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the idea for his youth literature Stuart Little
• Qualley acts as Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Yale student with whom the movie conceives Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in affection

Lorenz Hart has already been jilted by Richard Rodgers. Surely the cosmos can’t be so cruel as to cause him to be spurned by Elizabeth Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a youthful female who wants Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can reveal her exploits with young men – as well of course the showbiz connection who can further her career.

Standout Roles

Hawke shows that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in learning of these boys but he is also authentically, mournfully enamored with Elizabeth Weiland and the picture informs us of a factor rarely touched on in pictures about the realm of stage musicals or the movies: the terrible overlap between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Lorenz Hart is boldly cognizant that what he has accomplished will survive. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This could be a live show – but who shall compose the numbers?

Blue Moon screened at the London cinema festival; it is available on the 17th of October in the US, the 14th of November in the United Kingdom and on January 29 in the Australian continent.