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 is often digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.
Hawke gets big, world-weary laughs with Hart’s riffs on the hidden gayness of the movie Casablanca and the cheesily upbeat musical he’s just been to see, with all the lasso-twirling cowboys; he acidly calls it Okla-homo. The sexual identity of Hart is complex: this film effectively triangulates his gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music (with Mickey Rooney playing Hart); it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley.
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! and then a raft of stage and screen smashes. 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.
Even before the interval, Hart miserably ducks out and heads to the bar at Sardi’s where the rest of the film takes place, and waits for the (inevitably) triumphant Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, to pretend everything is all right. With suave restraint, Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation; he offers a sop to his pride in the form of a short-term gig writing new numbers for their existing show A Connecticut Yankee, which only makes it worse.
Bobby Cannavale plays the barman who in traditional style listens sympathetically to Hart’s arias of vinegary despair; Patrick Kennedy plays EB White, to whom Hart accidentally gives the idea for his children’s book Stuart Little; and Qualley plays Weiland, the unattainably beautiful Yale student with whom the film imagines Hart to be complicatedly and self-harmingly in love. Hart has already been jilted by Rodgers. Surely the universe can’t be so cruel as to get him jilted by Weiland as well? But Qualley ruthlessly portrays a young woman who wants Hart to be the giggly, sexually unthreatening intimate to whom she can confide her adventures with boys – as well of course the Broadway power broker who can further her career.
Hawke shows that Hart partly takes voyeuristic pleasure in hearing about these boys but he is also genuinely, tragically besotted with Weiland and the movie tells us about something rarely touched on in films about the world of musical theatre or the movies: the terrible overlap between professional and romantic 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?
