BLUE MOON

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Breaking up with the more prominent partner in a showbiz double act is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers.
He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke who gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheerily upbeat musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo.
As part of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for matchless numbers like ‘The Lady Is a Tramp, ‘Manhattan’, ‘My Funny Valentine’ and of course ‘Blue Moon’.
But exasperated with Hart’s alcoholism, unreliability and depressive outbursts, Rodgers broke with him and partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma!
The movie imagines the deeply depressed Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair as the show proceeds, despising its bland sentimentality, hating the exclamation mark at the end of the title, but heartsinkingly aware of how lethally effective it is. He knows a hit when he sees one – and feels himself descending into failure. Yet at some level, Hart is defiantly aware that what he has achieved will survive. It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical – but who will write the songs?