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Breaking up from the more famous partner in a performance duo is a hazardous business. Comedian Larry David went through it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now, this clever and heartbreakingly sad small-scale drama from writer Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the almost agonizing story of songwriter for Broadway the lyricist Lorenz Hart shortly following his breakup from composer Richard Rodgers. The character is acted with campy brilliance, an dreadful hairpiece and fake smallness by actor Ethan Hawke, who is frequently digitally shrunk in height – but is also at times filmed standing in an unseen pit to stare up wistfully at taller characters, confronting Hart's height issue as actor José Ferrer previously portrayed the petite artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Multifaceted Role and Elements

Hawke achieves big, world-weary laughs with the character's witty comments on the hidden gayness of the film Casablanca and the overly optimistic musical he’s just been to see, with all the lariat-wielding cowhands; he acidly calls it Okla-gay. The sexuality of Lorenz Hart is complex: this movie effectively triangulates his gayness with the non-queer character fabricated for him in the 1948 musical the production Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney portraying Lorenz Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his young apprentice: young Yale student and budding theater artist Weiland, acted in this movie with carefree youthful femininity by the performer Margaret Qualley.

As a component of the renowned Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was accountable for matchless numbers like the song The Lady Is a Tramp, the tune Manhattan, the beloved My Funny Valentine and of course the song Blue Moon. But annoyed at the lyricist's addiction, unreliability and melancholic episodes, Richard Rodgers ended their partnership and joined forces with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II to write the show Oklahoma! and then a series of live and cinematic successes.

Emotional Depth

The picture imagines the profoundly saddened Lorenz Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night Manhattan spectators in 1943, observing with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its mild sappiness, detesting the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but soul-crushingly cognizant of how extremely potent it is. He understands a hit when he watches it – and perceives himself sinking into defeat.

Before the intermission, Hart sadly slips away and makes his way to the tavern at Sardi’s where the balance of the picture unfolds, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! cast to appear for their post-show celebration. He knows it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to feign things are fine. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart's embarrassment; he offers a sop to his ego in the appearance of a short-term gig composing fresh songs for their current production the musical A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.

• Actor Bobby Cannavale plays the bartender who in standard fashion attends empathetically to Hart’s arias of bitter despondency
• Actor Patrick Kennedy portrays EB White, to whom Lorenz Hart unintentionally offers the concept for his youth literature the novel Stuart Little
• Margaret Qualley plays the character Weiland, the inaccessibly lovely Ivy League pupil with whom the picture conceives Lorenz Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love

Lorenz Hart has earlier been rejected by Richard Rodgers. Undoubtedly the world can’t be so cruel as to have him dumped by Weiland as well? But Margaret Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wishes Lorenz Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with young men – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can advance her profession.

Acting Excellence

Hawke demonstrates that Lorenz Hart to a degree enjoys spectator's delight in hearing about these boys but he is also truly, sadly infatuated with Weiland and the picture tells us about something infrequently explored in films about the world of musical theatre or the cinema: the awful convergence between occupational and affectionate loss. However at one stage, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has attained will endure. It's a magnificent acting job from Ethan Hawke. This might become a stage musical – but who will write the songs?

Blue Moon screened at the London movie festival; it is released on 17 October in the USA, 14 November in the UK and on January 29 in Australia.