Lorenz Hart isn't the most obvious subject for a biopic. What a lyricist does, even one as gifted as Hart, is heard rather than seen. Nor was his life a happy one. Hart was painfully short ("Five foot nothing," said his sister-in-law, who adored him), painfully closeted, and even more painfully alcoholic.

Ethan Hawke isn't the most obvious choice to play Hart. The biopic, "Blue Moon," opens Oct. 24. Hawke, who's 5 feet 10½ inches, is Texas goyim, not New York Jewish. The ages work pretty well, though. Hawke is 54. The movie takes place on March 31, 1943 -- for now, save the significance of that date -- when Hart was 47. He'd die nine months later.

It's been a busy year for Hawke. He's starring in "The Lowdown," currently streaming on Hulu and, "Black Phone 2" opened Friday. It's also been a busy year for Richard Linklater, who directed "Blue Moon." His "Nouvelle Vague," about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless," opens in theaters Oct. 31, arriving on Netflix Nov. 14.

It hasn't been a busy year for Hart. Actually, it hasn't been a busy 80 years. In neither life nor death has he much registered in the greater culture -- as, say, Cole Porter did and does, or George Gershwin.

Certainly, it was a busy career. Hart wrote the lyrics to more than 650 songs. Three dozen of them are among the greatest in the Great American Songbook: "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Manhattan," the title song of the new movie. Two excellent introductions to his body of work are "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Song Book" and "Tony Bennett Sings Rodgers & Hart Songs." What isn't a good introduction, but it's charming that it exists, is "The Supremes Sing Rodgers & Hart."

The songs have stayed out there, in supper clubs and musical revues and as jazz standards. They also show up in unexpected places. On "The Sun Sessions," along with the likes of "Good Rockin' Tonight" and "Mystery Train," Elvis Presley sings "Blue Moon." A later Elvis, Costello, released "My Funny Valentine" as the B side of the single of "Oliver's Army," in 1979. Ten years later, in "The Fabulous Baker Boys," Michelle Pfeiffer set aflutter the hearts of Beau and Jeff Bridges singing "My Funny Valentine" and "Ten Cents a Dance."

Much of Hart's lack of prominence is owing to his biggest stroke of artistic luck: that his composing partner was Richard Rodgers. Yet the date that "Blue Moon" takes place indicates how the Rodgers collaboration posthumously came to work against Hart. March 31, 1943 was the opening night of "Oklahoma!" Hart had declined to work on it. Rodgers turned to Oscar Hammerstein II. Thus was Rodgers & Hart (R&H1) succeeded by Rodgers & Hammerstein (R&H2). In writing "Oklahoma!," an enormous hit, R&H2 reinvented American musical theater. They would go on to confirm that reinvention with "Carousel," "South Pacific," "The King and I," and "The Sound of Music."

The dominance of R&H2 worked against Hart twice over. The second half of Rodgers's career has obscured the first, and Rodgers is more commonly associated with Hammerstein. Also, in reinventing the Broadway musical, R&H2 turned R&H1's collaborations, more than two dozen of them, into period pieces. (Pre-"Kiss Me, Kate," Cole Porter suffered the same fate.) Where R&H2 wrote musical theater, R&H1 wrote musical theater.

The only one of their titles that even fairly serious theatergoers are likely to recognize is "Pal Joey." And that may be as much because the original production made Gene Kelly a star, or that they've seen the glum 1957 film version, starring Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Rita Hayworth.

"Pal Joey" touches on another reason Hart fell by the wayside. The movies, which doted on Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, did not do well by R&H1. They spent an unhappy four years in Hollywood in the early '30s. That unhappiness may account for one of the funnier lines in "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Hate California -- it's cold and it's damp."

Their movie projects, both new scores and adaptations of their stage shows, either didn't happen or fared poorly. The one exception was "Love Me Tonight" (1932). When Vincente Minnelli was starting out as a film director, he'd often watch it, he said, "as it was such a perfect example of how to make a musical." Perfect, if also preposterous. Maurice Chevalier is a tailor who falls in love with Jeanette MacDonald's princess. Much of the dialogue is in rhyming couplets. Two classic Rodgers and Hart numbers are presented in highly non-classic fashion. Marching soldiers sing "Isn't It Romantic?," and McDonald belts out "Lover" as she drives a carriage drawn by galloping horses (paging Doctor Freud, paging Doctor Freud). It shouldn't work, but it does. It's the best Ernst Lubitsch movie not directed by Lubitsch.

There are multiple candidates for worst movie use of R&H1. In a league of its own is "Words and Music." A cheerfully dreadful 1948 biopic, it stars Mickey Rooney as Hart (is this height-casting or typecasting?), Tom Drake as Rodgers, and seemingly everyone then under contract at MGM. Which is good, because that included Kelly, Lena Horne, and Judy Garland (who delivers a knockout "Johnny One Note"). Which is bad, because that also included June Allyson, Perry Como, and Mel Tormé. The Technicolor does look fabulous, and Hart admirers will note which word comes first in the title.

The dominance of R&H2 would come at a cost, at least for Hammerstein. The better integrated a book musical is, the harder it becomes for a song to take on a life of its own. Hammerstein's lyrics are famous, but that fame rarely extends beyond the context of the musicals that feature them. Pep rallies excepted, "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" doesn't exactly cross over. Hart's "Mountain Greenery" ("While you love your lover, let/ Blue skies be your coverlet") most delightfully does.

There's a reason Ella didn't record a "Rodgers & Hammerstein Song Book" or that what is likely the most famous recording of an R&H2 song, John Coltrane's epochal version of "My Favorite Things," is an instrumental. R&H1's shows may now mostly be curios. But that means the songs good enough to endure, and there are many, can endure on their own. One of R&H1's most famous numbers is "A Ship without a Sail." Hart's lyrics are sails that don't need a ship. (They do need wind, which Rodgers provided.) Unlike Hammerstein's lyrics, they are, at their frequent best, wondrously airborne.

With Hammerstein, there are "all those goddamn praying larks and uplifting hymns for contralto ladies," as Rodgers's daughter Mary nicely -- or, in a different sense, not so nicely -- states it in her marvelous autobiography, "Shy." Put another way, there's an utter absence of raciness. Not with Hart. "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," from "Pal Joey," is emblematic: "Couldn't sleep/ And wouldn't sleep/ Until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep" or, just so there's no confusion, "Vexed again/ Perplexed again/ Thank God, I can be oversexed again."

Yet even at their most risqué, Hart's lyrics hint at despair -- when not outright despairing. Porter shared this louche quality and could deploy it with an even lighter touch. But he lacked Hart's abiding sense of sorrow. Compare "Ten Cents a Dance" with Porter's "Love for Sale." Porter's song is sung by a sex worker, as we'd now say. But, however euphemistically, "love" matters as much as "sale" in the title. The song is coy, even prim, in its transgressiveness. With Hart, the singer is a taxi dancer, the title a cash transaction, and the upshot is almost shockingly grim. Hart understood that love, romance, and sex, while members of the same family, don't necessarily share the same quarters.

Hart's sensibility has a uniquely contradictory quality. When the lyrics are buoyant and witty, they are gloriously buoyant and witty. When the lyrics are bleak and melancholy, they are crushingly bleak and melancholy. No one in the Great American Songbook, not even Porter, wrote lyrics that are more dazzling -- or darker. The beauty of Rodgers's melody makes it easy to overlook the nastiness of the sentiment in "My Funny Valentine": "Is your figure less than Greek?/ Is your mouth a little weak?/ When you open it to speak/ Are you smart?"

Hart has only three peers -- Porter, Berlin, and Ira Gershwin. Playing word-association with the names isn't hard to do. Porter is a wink, Berlin a smile, Ira Gershwin an embrace. Hart's harder to peg. He can be a grin or a wince -- sometimes both at once. It should come as no surprise that three of his best-known songs ("Blue Moon," "The Blue Room," "Little Girl Blue") have in common a synonym for sadness. An alertness to regret tinges even the happiest of his songs. "Blue Room" rhymes "trousseau" and "Robinson Crusoe," which is both inspired and hilarious. It also implicitly equates marriage with being cast away on a desert island. Even more than his phenomenal technical dexterity, it's Hart's capacity to convey unsatisfied yearning that most sets him apart.

But yearning is for second acts, not finales. So better to end with that dexterity. Boxing fans like to evaluate prizefighters "pound for pound" -- that is, even though a bigger fighter is (almost) always going to win a bout, that doesn't mean pure skill correlates with size. The equivalent for lyricists would be syllable for syllable. By that measure, there can't be a wittier piece of songwriting in English than the refrain of "Thou Swell":

Hart could have written those last three lines while looking in the mirror. The description certainly fits, and he'd have had every right to address himself that way, right down to the exclamation marks.

A Rodgers & Hart Top 21

(with apologies for leaving out "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Have You Met Miss Jones?," "Here in My Arms," "Johnny One Note," "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," "A Ship without a Sail," "Spring Is Here," "There's a Small Hotel," "Ten Cents a Dance," and, yes, the list goes on)

"Everything I've Got Belongs to You," Cécile McLorin Salvant

"Thou Swell," Joe Williams with the Count Basie Orchestra

In 'Blue Moon,' a reintroduction to the dazzle and darkness of Lorenz Hart - The Boston Globe