American actor Ethan Hawke gives a powerful but disturbing performance as the alcoholic lyricist Lorenz Hart in director Richard Linklater’s Berlinale competition entry “Blue Moon”, named for one of Hart’s songs with his longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers, played by Irish actor Andrew Scott.

Alternately witty, solicitous, hectoring and maddening in his barroom banter, Hawke chews up the scenery for much of the film, which is set in the Manhattan restaurant-bar Sardi’s, one of his favourite haunts.

“I have written a handful of words that will cheat death,” Hart says early on in Linklater’s sensitive but raw tribute to the man who wrote 1,000 songs, including “Bewitched”, “I’ll Take Manhattan” and “My Funny Valentine”, that remain an integral part of the American song lexicon.

When later in the film, Rodgers rattles off Hart’s accomplishments, he bats away the praise, saying, “It sounds like you’re writing my obituary.”

Hart was in fact about to encounter an early death, at age 48, when he was found in a drunken stupor in the gutter outside another Manhattan bar. That ugly scene opens Linklater’s film, so there’s no illusion about the downward trajectory to come.

What precedes it is the event that in all likelihood contributed to Hart’s fatal binge — the opening night on March 31, 1943 at the Shubert Theater of “Oklahoma!”. It went on to become the most successful musical in the history of the American theatre, but it was the first in which Rodgers, who had collaborated with Hart for two decades on hits like “Pal Joey” and “The Boys from Syracuse”, wrote with his new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Linklater, one of America’s most prominent independent directors, whose films include “Slacker”, “Boyhood” and “Before Sunset”, uses the 100-minute running time to follow Hart in real time as he slips out of the premiere early and heads to Sardi’s. That’s where the cast party for “Oklahoma!” is to be held, in an upstairs banquet room, while Hart holds court at the downstairs bar.

The look, but also the smells, the sounds and the feel of 1940s New York City, almost seem to bleed through the screen. And in Sardi’s, Hart knows every nook, cranny and bottle.

He’s trying, half heartedly, to stay off the booze, so he tells his regular bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) to pour him a shot but only for show, and to give him a glass of seltzer to drink. That teetotal behaviour is not going to last because another customer in the bar is the essayist E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), also an alcoholic, with whom Hart eventually shares a round. In their banter, Hart offhandedly provides the name “Stuart” for White’s famous children’s book “Stuart Little”, about a mouse born to human parents.

Another of the problems that sends Hart into a frenzy of almost non-stop monologue for much of the film’s running time is his expected liaison that night with Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). She’s a statuesque, blonde college co-ed less than half Hart’s age (he’s 47, she’s 20), with whom he’s shared an intimate but platonic weekend in Vermont and is hoping this night to go further.

Age, however, is not the problem. What everyone and the dogs in the street know is that Hart, if not overtly gay, is not attracted to women sexually. In the film’s grisly opening shots showing Hart staggering through the rain to the place where he will collapse, he glances fleetingly but longingly at two sailors who pass him by.

But the main thing nagging Hart is that after two decades of collaboration, the two Jewish boys from New York who met when Hart was in his 20s and Rodgers was 17, have drifted apart.

Hart, who has seen “Oklahoma!” in previews and despises it, down to the exclamation point in the title, is scathing about Hammerstein’s lyrics.

“Hey fellas,” he says to the barman and the piano player, “just for the record, ‘the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye’ is the stupidest lyric in the history of American songwriting. Yes, it makes perfect sense and yes, it scans, but the image of an Oklahoma cornfield with a fucking elephant standing in the middle of it…”

The relationship between Hart and Rodgers is not completely sundered and arriving for the cast party, Rodgers suggests they collaborate on a revival of their 1927 hit “A Connecticut Yankee”. Rodgers, who is played to perfection by Scott as a friend but also a man whose business is writing songs, knows Hart is a genius at lyrics but he’s had enough of him showing up at noon and going out after 15 minutes in search of cigars.

But Hart, after a few drinks at the downstairs bar, is deeply into the obsessive behaviour that makes it impossible for him to swear off the drink, or stop haranguing people. He criticises the happy ending of “Oklahoma!” and tries to sell Rodgers on the idea of a Marco Polo musical with all new songs satirising every musical style he can think of, including what he calls a “cannibal” parody version of a song from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”.

“I owe my professional life to you,” Rodgers says, in genuine gratitude, but with the realisation that Hart is going somewhere he will not follow.

At a news conference, Hawke said the divide between art that offends, which is what Hart relishes, and art that is inoffensive, like “Oklahoma!”, has become even more manifest.

“For offensive art to have a place in our conversation, it has to be cared about,” Hawke said. “And when we prioritise money at all costs, what we get is generic material that appeals to the most amount of people and we’re told that’s the best.

“It’s a dance we all do together. If you love offensive art and you want it, demand it. Right now, people don’t think they’ll make any money off it so it doesn’t get made.”

— By Michael Roddy

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