Ethan Hawke gives a terrific performance as the lyricist Lorenz Hart in this witty and touching film imagining the Broadway breakup of his partnership with composer Richard Rodgers
It's March 31 1943 and legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart confronts his shattered self-confidence, his professional and private life unravelling, as his former collaborator Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) celebrates the opening night of his hit musical “Oklahoma!”
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 film imagines Hart in Oklahoma!’s first-night New York audience in 1943, looking on with envious despair. He knows a hit when he sees one. Even before the interval, Hart ducks out and heads to the bar at Sardi’s and waits for the triumphant Oklahoma! company to show up for their after-party. He knows it is his showbiz duty to congratulate Rodgers, played with suave restraint by Andrew Scott, clearly embarrassed at what they both know is Hart’s humiliation.
Added to all this is the unattainably beautiful Yale student, would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, (Margaret Qualley) with whom the film imagines Hart to be complicatedly in love...
Cert 15