Miranda similarly spares us a thick air of portent about Larson’s impending death, which would color the whole experience as a cruel prelude to tragedy. He offers a few Easter eggs for diehards here and there-there’s a character named Roger, someone is referred to as “pookie,” etc.-but Tick, Tick remains admirably fixed on what came before that seismic blockbuster. He powerfully manifests a creative spirit both in bitter ebb and glorious bloom.īut Miranda is careful not to lean too hard on the Rent prophecy of it all. For all its theatricality, Garfield’s work here is the clearest distillation of his movie star appeal, that shaggy warmth and intellect flecked with a swagger of haughty confidence. It’s a sharp, holistic performance, adeptly depicting Jonthan’s fervor and frustration, his charm and a tunnel-visioned artist’s tendency to alienate those around him. By the closing song, “Louder Than Words,” his voice has softened, glimmering with hope and melancholy. On the opening song, “30/90,” he thrashes and whines with convincing petulance-like an early pop-punk artist-at the idea of 30somethingness. Despite that decade-ish age gap, Garfield sensitively embodies the itch and anxiety of a post-adolescent beholding the loom of true adulthood. Jonathan, who’s about to turn 30, is played by Andrew Garfield, who is not far from turning 40. A lively ache fills those humble spaces, teased out of the material with a winning blend of theater-kid corniness and practical, grownup insight. For the most part, Miranda sticks to the analog wilds of cramped apartments, spare rehearsal rooms, and a simply adorned stage where Jonathan performs a version of Tick, Tick…Boom! sometime after the present-tense events of the film. But we can excuse the excess because that may be the kind of sweetly nerdy and ambitious dream the real Larson also had. There is some indulgence, like a fantasy sequence that has Miranda calling in all of his industry favors to wrangle a host of theater luminaries into cameo roles. It is no doubt a help that Miranda and Levenson know a thing or two about writing musicals themselves Miranda in particular has cited Larson as a major influence on his nascent craft, and that ardency and understanding is deeply felt throughout this, his debut film. But director Lin-Manuel Miranda and screenwriter Steven Levenson ( Dear Evan Hansen) have found ingenious ways to film Larson’s gangly riot, cogently and poignantly. From many angles, Tick, Tick would seem unfilmable, a jumbled collage of a life and a creative furnace that offers little cinematic possibility. Songs from Superbia feature in Tick, Tick…Boom!, but the latter show also has its own tunes, originally performed onstage by Larson. He’s been toiling away at a passion project called Superbia for the better part of a decade, a sci-fi sort of thing that is bristling with youthful passion but is perhaps too unwieldy in all its big swings. It’s a heavily autobiographical piece about a struggling musical theater writer in 1990 New York, trying to find the words and music that will connect with producers, audiences, and himself. The stage version of Tick, Tick…Boom! was written by the late Jonathan Larson just before he started work on his magnum opus, Rent. Somehow, the film shines through those many layers of metacontext. That is, essentially, all that’s wrapped up in Tick, Tick…Boom!, which debuts on Netflix on November 20. Finally, along comes a movie musical, based on a stage musical, about the writing of another musical, as its creator is on the way toward writing one of the most defining musicals (a third, different musical) of the last 50 years.
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