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.
