Tick, Tick … Boom! review: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tribute to the creator of Rent

In 1990, Rent writer and composer Jonathan Larson turned 30 years old. At the time, he was living in a Spartan loft in Lower Manhattan near SoHo and working part-time at a restaurant while developing a sci-fi musical called Pride, based on George Orwell 1984. In the eight years since he graduated from Adelphi University on Long Island, Larson had built a reputation in the New York theater community as a promising young talent. But he was broke and frustrated at how slowly his career progressed. He was still three years away from the first Rent, a groundbreaking and blockbuster musical that won’t be officially released until 1996, the night Larson died unexpectedly.

In 1990, Lin-Manuel Miranda turned 10 years old. He lived with his parents in Upper Manhattan, near Washington Heights, and attended an exclusive elementary school for gifted students. By the end of the decade, he would be at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where, inspired by Rent – He would begin to develop the musical that would become the Broadway hit. In the heights. Miranda was 28 when In the heights won the Best Musical award at the Tonys. At age 30, he would be one of the most sought-after talents in musical theater and would make inroads as a television and film actor and writer. At 35, Larson’s age when he died, Miranda was enjoying accolades for her success on Broadway. Hamilton.

Now 41, Miranda has directed her first feature film: an adaptation of one of Larson’s precursors.Rent plays, the autobiographical Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! (The film’s limited theatrical release begins on November 12 and will arrive on Netflix on November 19.) Working with screenwriter Steven Levenson, who wrote the Tony-winning book for Dear Evan Hansen and also helped run the television miniseries Fosse / Verdon Along with longtime collaborator Thomas Kail, Miranda has reshaped Larson’s work into a simpler biopic with songs. The film tells the story of how the composer got through a crucial year in his life, when he was about to give up his Broadway dreams.

Andrew Garfield plays “Jon”, who at the beginning of Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! he’s sweating two big deadlines: his 30th birthday and an industry showcase for his work in progress Pride. The film is essentially a collection of vignettes from Jon’s daily life, showing him going back and forth between the Moondance Diner and the cluttered workspace in his loft, stopping occasionally to spend time with his abandoned girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) and his best friend Michael. (Robin of Jesus).

Susan is a dancer looking for opportunities to earn a living elsewhere than in exorbitantly expensive New York. Michael left acting to work in advertising and tries to help Jon earn extra money doing market research, while suggesting that perhaps he could channel his talents in a more commercial direction. Jon remains committed to finishing PrideHowever, buoyed by the positive comments it has received from Broadway legends such as Stephen Sondheim (played perfectly by Bradley Whitford).

Garfield has no musical theater background, but he has long been a master playing guys like Jon: good-hearted but stubborn, and willing to pursue his obsessions even when it makes them difficult to live with. (Watch: The amazing Spider Man, 99 Homes, Mountain crest, Be quiet, Under the silver lake… The list goes on.) Garfield has a voice fine enough for this role; after all, Larson himself was not primarily known as a singer.

What Garfield really brings to the role is a sense of Jon’s boundless enthusiasm for all manner of arts and culture. He portrays the character as someone who processes everything from theater to rock ‘n’ roll to hip-hop to film to politics in terms of how he can turn it into a song. One of the main subplots of the film is that while Jon is sweating, the reaction to Pride, is also compiling notes on the bohemian New York of the 90s and the AIDS crisis, which would eventually become Rent.

But there is more here than a mere biography. Miranda’s Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! is a melancholic and somewhat regretful tribute to a creator who could never enjoy the payoff for his many years of hard work in relative obscurity. And it’s a personal reflection on the nebulousness of New York in 1990, a time when the burgeoning creativity of the 1980s was coming to an end and the next generation of artists had yet to emerge. Not everything Miranda and Levenson try with this movie works, but even in its messiest form, the movie is always meaningful.

That way, it’s a good adaptation of the source material, which is everywhere. Larson initially wrote it as a reaction to his struggle to get Pride produced. He performed it in different ways as what he called “a rock monologue,” combining an eclectic set of pop songs with humorous anecdotes about his struggles. After Rent became a gigantic success, Larson’s friend Victoria Leacock asked playwright David Auburn (best known for Test) conceive again Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! as a small-scale theater musical with a three-person cast, which finally debuted on Off-Broadway in 2001. Since then, this version has been presented around the world, including in a 2014 limited edition with Miranda at the helm. head, about eight months before Hamilton released.

In other words, there is no “official” Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! – not even this movie. The show started life as something of a sketchbook, with Larson trying different ways of turning real life into theater, while working on Rent (a project first introduced to him in 1989 by playwright Billy Aronson, who first had the idea of ​​turning Puccini’s opera Bohemian in a story about New York at the end of the 20th century). Taking your cues from what the original concert form of Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! they set out to do, Miranda and Levenson scrap some elements from the Auburn musical to fit more about Larson and the city.

This choice sacrifices some narrative momentum. Sometimes this movie feels more like a collection of settings than a story proper. And since the filmmakers are mostly limited to the songs Larson wrote for this piece, they don’t have the numbers they need to get the flop from Pride to what came next. As a result, the ending of the movie feels a bit rushed.

But from one moment to the next, this version of Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! it is sincere and moving. It’s a generous two-hour note from Miranda to the man who helped make her career possible. Several of the songs are impressive, including the ballad “Why” (a poignant reflection on Jon’s lifelong friendship with Michael), the lighthearted ditty “Boho Days” (which is like Rent compressed into three minutes), the comedy “Therapy” (a dissection of a broken relationship, in the style of Kander and Ebb’s musicals as Chicago and Cabaret) and “Sunday” (a Sondheim-derived ode to brunch with an impressive list of cameos that Netflix has asked critics not to reveal). Musical theater fans will want to repeatedly see the best numbers from this movie, and there are plenty of them.

But people who can remember the 1990s deeply should be equally affected by Miranda and her design team’s attention to detail. At one point, they recreate the appearance of a Me! Mtv raps video of the era. In another, they scour Jon’s collection of books, tapes, and vinyl LPs, which are heavy on Broadway but also include a fair amount of ’80s punk and classic rock. The film also captures how special it was every time PBS rerun the American playhouse episode featuring the original Broadway production of Sondheim Sunday in the park with George. The nostalgic pangs of a theater nerd from the late ’80s and early’ 90s resonate.

When Larson was writing and rewriting Tick, Tick… ​​Boom!, the rejection of Pride and regretting his lack of prospects. While the title of the piece suggested that time was running out, he had no idea that he would be dead just over five years later. What Miranda brings to her version is the gift of hindsight. Where Larson saw dead ends, Miranda can see new paths opening. The vision of a man of a New York in decline is the memory of another of a city on the verge of transformation. However, what both Larson and Miranda understand is that artists have to keep moving forward, leaving a mark where and while they can, before tomorrow runs out.

Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! It opens in limited theaters on November 12 and debuts on Netflix on November 19.