I went to see Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon because I’m one of the extremely niche group of people still living who care about the life and work of lyricist Lorenz Hart. Hart was a scintillating talent and a tormented man who wrote the lyrics for the scores of many hit musical shows from the 1920s and ’30s with his longtime friend and songwriting partner, composer Richard Rodgers.

Just to give you an idea of the extent of my interest in this subject, when it comes to the Great American Songbook standards written by Rodgers and Hart and recorded by a rotation of top singers through the early 1960s, I have favorite versions of the songs. Here’s a partial rundown: “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (Ella Fitzgerald); “My Funny Valentine” (Chet Baker); “Blue Moon” (Elvis Presley); “I Could Write a Book” (Frank Sinatra); “Little Girl Blue” (Judy Garland); “Lover” (Peggy Lee); and “The Lady Is a Tramp” (Lena Horne).

This movie’s gotten a remarkably wide release considering the fact that, when it comes to who its audience might be, there’s. . . me. And, y’know, a smattering of others.

Anyway, naturally I was there in an almost empty theater to see this film written by novelist-screenwriter Robert Kaplow (Me and Orson Welles) about the dark night of the soul for Lorenz Hart when Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in 1943 and became the kind of landmark hit that redefined an entire stage genre. The score to Oklahoma! — or, as Hart calls it witheringly in Blue Moon, “Oklahoma-exclamation-point” — was written by Richard Rodgers and his new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Rodgers and Hart had been friends and writing partners since 1919, and they were extremely successful young men from the mid-1920s on, with hits such as Babes in Arms, A Connecticut Yankee, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey. But Rodgers and Hammerstein went beyond mere success right out of the gate. Oklahoma! was immediately heralded as one for the ages. And as the newly celebrated team moved from one colossal hit to the next — Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music — their names became synonymous with the Broadway musical.

Hart attended the Oklahoma! premiere and foresaw the kind of a legendary status it was going to have. Initially Rodgers had offered Hart the job of writing the lyrics, and Hart had turned it down. He had no interest in a nostalgic view of rural life featuring a cowboy named Curly flirting with a spunky farm girl dressed in gingham. His attitude toward American culture tended to be satirical. He was a lifelong New Yorker, the son of affluent, highly accomplished German Jewish immigrants. He was a noted wit, a sophisticate, an effervescent party host, and a man-about-town. He was also barely five feet tall and oddly proportioned, with a head that looked too large for his body. He joked that it was the weight of his oversize brain that had tamped down his vertical growth.

But he suffered agonies over his appearance and its effect on his love life. He proposed to at least two women with whom he had intense friendships, but he was turned down both times. In the movie, he’s haunted by the line he hears from these women who try to let him down easier by telling him they love him, “just not that way.”

Hart was rumored to be gay. He was subject to deep depressions and became a raging alcoholic, sometimes disappearing for binge-drinking sessions lasting days or weeks. His erratic inability to work on a predictable schedule drove the tightly controlled, businesslike Rodgers mad even at the best of times. By the early ’40s, Rodgers had had enough.

And it wasn’t just personal strife driving Hart’s career woes. Times and tastes had changed by the World War II years, as Rodgers keeps telling him in the film. As the war is being won and the economy revives and surges, audiences are craving affirmations of American life that would’ve been laughed off in the cynical, wised-up, Depression-era heyday of Hart’s peak years in the late 1920s and ’30s.

This is the background of the situation Linklater is dramatizing in Blue Moon. The film is almost entirely located in a few rooms at the famous bar-restaurant Sardi’s, where an after-show private party is taking place, and where Hart is making a desperate last stand both professionally and personally. He’s pretending to be gracious and congratulatory about the Oklahoma! triumph. It seems Hart really did go to the after-party at Sardi’s and say the line he delivers in the movie: “This is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen in my life, and it’ll be playing twenty years from now.”

But really he’s seething with jealousy and terror, and he’s trying to win back Rodgers as his songwriting partner. He’s also hoping for evidence of reciprocal love and desire from his current romantic obsession, Elizabeth Weiland, a twenty-year-old student at the Yale School of Art who’s a Bohemian heartbreaker seeking a career in the theater.

Ethan Hawke seems like unlikely casting as Hart, but with elaborate makeup, hair, costume, and camera effects to reduce the actor’s height and make him appear balding, stocky, and unhandsome, he does a creditable job. Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, who was widely reputed to be a cold careerist bastard, with Hart as his emotional Achilles’ heel. And Margaret Qualley brings mercurial charm to the character of Weiland, whose real-life letters to Hart were the inspiration for Kaplow’s screenplay.

There are odd portrayals of other famous people here, though. Oscar Hammerstein II, for example, is dismissed by Hart as a freakishly tall sentimental slob who writes primitive lyrics. While watching the finale of Oklahoma! with the whole cast onstage belting out the title tune, singing, “We know we belong to the land,” Hart tells his mother sneeringly to get set for the word “grand” as the simple rhyme at the end of the next line. And sure enough, the cast goes on singing, “…and the land we belong to is grand!”

An incessant reader, Hart was noted for the sophistication of his broad vocabulary and the unexpected flourishes he brought to his rhyme schemes. Consider “My Funny Valentine,” with the lines, “Your looks are laughable / Unphotographable,” or the opening of “Manhattan”: “We’ll take Manhattan / The Bronx and Staten Island too…”

At first, we assume Hart’s waspish view of Hammerstein will be at least slightly corrected by aspects of the character and performance when we finally see him at the Sardi’s party. After all, we see that Hart’s besotted love for Weiland is not returned long before he can see it. But Simon Delaney as Hammerstein looks and acts like a big clown, verifying Hart’s view of his rival. Hammerstein was religious, sincere, and a believer in liberal progress fostered by musical theater, but he was also a New Yorker, born and bred, just like Hart. They were both born in Harlem, just blocks apart, and Hammerstein was a savvy showbiz veteran who’d been raised in the entertainment industry. He was Jerome Kern’s writing partner before he teamed up with Richard Rodgers. Their Showboat in 1927 was the most important and ambitious musical in terms of developing the “integrated” musical play — which interweaves the songs as seamlessly as possible with narrative and deals in more dramatic subject matter than the then-typical musical comedy or musical revue — until Oklahoma! came along.

But Linklater and Kaplow pile on the scorn by providing Hammerstein with an unlikely sidekick named “Stevie” (Cillian Sullivan), an obnoxious twelve-year-old devotee of musicals who insults Hart’s work to his face. You have to be in the know to recognize that the unpleasant kid is supposed to be Stephen Sondheim, who was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein and later became a revolutionary figure in the musical form as well. It seems that the adult Sondheim did indeed say disparaging things about Hart’s talent — such as “I don’t like Lorenz Hart’s lyrics because he’s lazy. His inflections are all off” — though I doubt very much he was an underage Addison DeWitt attending a party at Sardi’s and dissing Lorenz Hart personally.

There’s also a series of conversations between Hart and writer E. B. White, though there’s no evidence the two knew each other. Kaplow just wanted a writer Hart could talk to at Sardi’s. White is represented as a quiet melancholic who’s also convinced his best creative days are behind him, though he hasn’t even published Charlotte’s Web. In Blue Moon, Kaplow has Hart tell a poignant lonely-man story of a mouse in his apartment that he comes to regard as a friend, and it’s clearly supposed to be the catalyst for White’s Stuart Little.

Blue Moon is very contained and play-like in its confined settings, and the camera movements are modest and unobtrusive. Hart, a Sardi’s regular, spends a good deal of time at the bar, talking to the bartender Eddie (an amusing Bobby Cannavale), the hired piano player Morty (Jonah Lees), and other restaurant personnel, who form a somewhat protective band around him over the course of the evening — though even Morty asks to be introduced to Richard Rodgers. So does Elizabeth Weiland.

It’s not at all lost on Hart the extent to which he’s being written off by even those who admire him and are fond of him. After drinking his umpteenth shot of bourbon, he floats the opinion that, after so many years of blessings, even God may be done with him.

Which brings me to the key problem with the film. It should be a gut punch, the way this film winds up. Hawke has some very effective moments when Hart’s terror is visible in his eyes and in the quaver of his voice and the desperate clenching and unclenching of his hands. The queasy-making looks on people’s faces as they’re trying to extricate themselves from a too-close identification with someone perceived as a failure — a mixture of pity, contempt, and studied withdrawal — are uncomfortably well portrayed by Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley. Blue Moon is a thorough, detailed examination of an agonizing fall into oblivion that really did take place in public. As the film tells us, Hart only lived a few months after the Oklahoma! premiere, dying a particularly awful alcoholic’s death — found in a drunken stupor sitting on a curb in a rainstorm, and expiring of pneumonia a few days later.

But as special and particular as Hart’s eradication was, it should still resonate with everyone who’s ever recognized the process of winnowing-out someone who’s being sidelined professionally, whether you were the one getting humiliatingly shunted aside or just the witness of someone else’s humiliation — or one of the main shunters. Yet despite heartsick moments, that doesn’t happen. Somehow the film’s slow-build structure fails, and the impact of this cataclysmic night dissipates well before we get to the end.

Still, it’s interesting for a small group of still-avid Hart fans. Though why this peculiar little film didn’t just run on HBO Max or Netflix instead of getting a major theatrical release is a distracting question. Richard Linklater must have extraordinary pull to get big-screen releases for his two esoteric period movies this year, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, a film about the making of the breakout French New Wave film Breathless (1960). Anybody who ever tried to shunt Richard Linklater aside must be marveling at his long career staying power.