It’s been a while since I’ve seen as egregious a piece of miscasting as Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. He plays Lorenz Hart, a great musical talent who with Broadway composer Richard Rodgers co-created such shows as A Connecticut Yankee, Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, in addition to penning countless classics from the title track to “Isn’t it Romantic” to “My Funny Valentine.” He was also alcoholic, prickly, depressive and as openly homo as multiple closets would allow. So not someone that would make most among us go, “I know! … Ethan Hawke!”

That’s no dealbreaker, of course. (And to preemptively nip a certain perennial criticism in the bud: Straight actors playing gay? All for it, always lustily have been and will be.) Though it’s anyone’s guess why Hawke and Linklater settled on a Hart who comes off as Gay Gollum.

That’s a more apt description than you might suspect given the F/X-heavy lengths to which the film goes to shrink Hawke down to Hart’s 5-foot stature. The meticulously detailed Sardi’s restaurant set around which Hart skulks and where almost all of the action takes place — on the night Rodgers (Andrew Scott), teamed for the first time with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), premiered the Hart-less Oklahoma! — is reported to have had troughs in which Hawke could sidle along lower-than his costars. And in full body shots he appears to have either been digitally shrunk or had his face CG-transplanted onto a body double. Anamorphic lenses were also utilized to help, such as it is, sell the illusion.

That’s a lot of effort for what proves very little reward since Hawke’s performance is almost all indicative surface. Spitting out loquaciously catty invective from beneath a swishy, sloshed, bald-pated façade, he’s working in a similarly to-the-rafters register as Michael Douglas’s Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. Yet there, director/d.p. Steven Soderbergh’s aesthetic chilliness and Matt Damon’s gentle (and easily exploitable) warmth helped to ground the mince and make it credible. In Blue Moon, Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly do a more simplistic track-and-capture job, which allows Hawke free rein to indulge his worst instincts: Big and bullyingly broad opposite Sardi’s bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and his staff; daintily, drunkenly pathetic opposite the hilariously stone-faced, had-it-with-this-shit Rodgers.

That Scott won an acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival and Hawke did not is…telling, perhaps. At times you wish Linklater had engaged his more experimental side and shot an alternate version of Blue Moon in which Hawke and Scott switched roles — much better casting, that, at least in the mind’s eye. Though they’d still be stuck with Robert Kaplow’s embarrassingly fan-fictiony script, with its tell-don’t-show dialogue, dramaturgically suspect occurrences (Hart giving fellow barmate E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) the idea for Stuart Little), and wink-wink nudge-nudge cameos from the likes of George Roy Hill (David Rawle) and Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan)..

Credit where due: A long scene late in the picture between Hart and his protégé/beard Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley) is the one time Hawke is forced to settle down and genuinely react, in the process effectively, and affectingly, conveying the many accumulated hurts of Hart’s diminishing lifetime. But otherwise, Blue Moon engenders a robust longing for a blackout stupor.