Tick, Tick . . . Boom! (2021)

(Begins streaming on Netflix on Friday, November 19)

(Jonathan Larson (left) is portrayed by Andrew Garfield (right) in Tick, Tick . . . Boom!)

The late, lamented Jonathan Larson (played here by Andrew Garfield) was for nearly his entire life the soul of the struggling artist.  The original Tick, Tick . . . Boom! was a one-man autobiographical musical about . . . the travails of the very man who'd written and performed it.  That small-scale one-man rock opera's cast was later increased to three performers.

Its story turned on Larson’s anguish and joy as it recounted the events, from harrowing to hilarious, that inspired him, with at first Larson and later three actors playing a complement of roles.  The show evoked Larson’s past before the audience’s eyes.  It did this partly to show that Larson had a grip on what had shaped his life so far, and, hopefully, to offer some lessons to an audience about the journey of a struggling artist with high hopes for the future.

The movie does two things.  It in part replicates that stage show, albeit with a much larger complement of musicians. It also cuts to new, fully drawn recreations of events that had only been narrated or mimed on stage, with scenes set in Soho apartments, the diner where Larson worked as a waiter, a luxury apartment building and mid-Manhattan offices.

While watching a recreation of the onstage show, we’re also given a detailed treatment of Larson’s actual life, with fully rendered scenes of the experiences that made him.  We’re even shown “home movies” from his early years.

This movie’s expansion of that early Larson show, not unlike its mercurial creator, triumphs because it decides time and again simply to take the plunge.  To dive in. To commit to making (1) art for art’s sake and (2) art that will pay the bills.

It begins by looking at where Larson’s exuberant, chaotic life stood in 1990, some five years before Rent, his transformative Pulitzer-Prize-winning musical that he never lived to see performed before a live audience.    It’s the age-old story of a creative individual writhing in a garret.  Larson was unapologetically on a yowling, arm-flailing artistic mission, built on a swelling belief that his talent could defy the odds.

Here we get to see actors portray the people around Larson who helped him keep faith with a musical voice that he feared would never find a home where he so fervently longed to be, on Broadway.

We enter into Larson's struggle on the eve of his 30th birthday.  A hardworking, clearly gifted musical journeyman, Larson has been toiling for eight years on a futuristic, space-set rock opera called Superbia. That show was never fully produced, but here early on Larson announces that its production will validate his self-description as "the future of musical theater".  We're witnessing Larson’s labor to write and launch Superbia, whose failure, though he doesn’t know it, will result in Tick, Tick . . . Boom!  And later, of course, in the galvanic Rent.

There's chutzpah at play here, of course.  Also, copious talent.  Also, troublesome roadblocks.  When we meet Larson, he scrapes by as a part-time waiter at the Soho diner Moondance, lives in an erratically heated walk-up with his roommate Michael (Robin de Jesus), and hasn't managed to get even a foothold in the tough, hypercritical world of New York musical theater, on or off Broadway.

Superbia, he's convinced, can put him solidly in the theatrical game, make him a player and not merely a fecund, prodigally gifted – unknown – creator.   And creator he surely is.  He can write, he declares, about anything, including a song about sugar that he tossed off in a neat three hours.

The workshop of Superbia, to which he’s invited some of New York theater's top names, is due to open in a mere seven days.  Yet the show's crucial second act number, tying its story together, still isn't written.  No less than Stephen Sondheim (artfully impersonated here by Bradley Whitford), after viewing an earlier run through, has warned Larson that that song must be the linchpin for the show's wind-up.

The clock also is ticking for those around Jonathan.  Michael has given up on his acting career and is about to move into the luxury apartment he can now afford due to his well-paid job in advertising.

(Andrew Garfield and Alexandra Shipp in Tick, Tick . . . Boom!)

Jonathan's girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), wants to take her career as a dancer to the next level, and needs to know if Jon is willing to move with her out of New York City.  Since that grinding metropolis happens to contain the heart of American musical theater, Larson is hugely conflicted.

What's more, he's saddened and terrified as gay friends succumb to AIDS, and the country isn't providing help for the crisis with anything like the resolve that's needed (a grievance that will extend into rage in Rent).

This turmoil is fodder, in the right hands, for a moving musical, and we get it here.  The musical numbers – most notably the jouncing, beautifully antic "Boho Days" – are brought to life by Larson's protean imagination, sometimes after we see that he’s written them down, on other occasions, ad-libbed, in real time.  

But Larson’s creative gift has to fight off self-sabotage.  That second act number, “Come to Your Senses”, is meant to knit the workshop of Superbia, as well as this movie, together.  Yet before we get there, we watch in dismay as Larson, his teeth gritted, determined to write, draws a total blank.  The crisis of getting the song written in time for the crucial workshop keeps us on edge, and, with the movie slyly teaseing us, we're not exactly sure he's going to make it.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, making his debut as a movie director, draws on a long attachment to Larson.  He performed in a 2014 production of Tick, Tick . . . Boom!  And he's long acknowledged that Rent was one of the key inspirations for his writing of In the Heights, the hit Broadway musical that was recently filmed (reviewed in MovieStruck on 10/31/21).  He also went on to write and produce his own transformative Broadway musical, Hamilton.

The heartfelt admiration for an artist who struggled, as Miranda has, to break into the Broadway fold, to make an individual mark in the toughest commercial theater market in the world, is evident throughout the movie.  The grungy apartment, the late nights composing for an audience one can't even fully imagine, the pile of unpaid bills, the good friends in need, the love that can't be fulfilled, are all here.  And Miranda depicts them honestly in scenes that are gritty, comic and sometimes stark.

Of the Garfield performances I’ve seen, I'm still most impressed by his work in Angels in America, shown in theaters on a video of that show's 2017 London production.  There he played Prior Walter, a gay man facing unrequited love and battling an HIV-positive diagnosis, and Garfield was haunted and spellbinding in rendering both terror and suddenly-found courage.  (He won a Tony for the role after the show moved to Broadway in 2018.)

So, I wasn't surprised here to see Garfield merge Larson's manic energy and charm with his selfish, magnetically unstoppable drive to succeed.  Garfield learned to sing and play piano for this role, and he does both with the panache and grace of a seasoned performer.  Filled with laughing, constantly reignited energy, this performance could mark a turning point in Garfield's career.  It brims with musicality, but also with an emotional electricity and vulnerability that suggest unexpected directions his talent could take.

De Jesus, following an appropriately high-risk take on the flamboyant Emory of The Boys in the Band, this time holds himself back until an explosive argument shows the life sadly unlived underneath Michael's material success.  De Jesus doesn't overplay the moment, and like the entire performance, it registers precisely because it's gentler than it first seems, and modestly scaled.

This movie took me back in time.  I saw Rent in May 1996, a few weeks after it opened on Broadway.  I'd read the sad story of how Larson had died, at age 35, of an aortic dissection the morning of the show's first preview, and thus hadn't lived to see his show complete its downtown run and move to Broadway.

I'd also read the rave reviews, and was expecting a kind of rough lyricism, given the show's setting in an AIDS-afflicted Lower East Side, reeling from health and financial calamities, filled with empty buildings that were home to squatters.

Rent hadn't disappointed.  Its urgent contemporary narrative, echoing Puccini’s La Bohème, was almost entirely sung, and the variety of Larson's songs, the penetrating lyrics, pushed its young artist/rebels along with verve and speed.  If the show had an intermission, I don't remember it.

What most captivated me was the riverlike feel of its songs.  They seemed to come not one after another but one out of the other.  As I made my way home, I thought, as by then thousands of others surely were thinking, this man, Jonathan Larson, clearly had hundreds more songs in him.  What an enormous loss.

I never expected to feel such pangs about a musical experience again, where the music flowed and showed no signs of – or, more accurately, earthly reason for – stopping.

I felt a similar wave watching Tick, Tick . . . Boom!  The music, all of it Larson's, seems like it won't ever stop, and the singers seem not just to sing it out, but to give in to it.  There's more power and pathos in it than the screen can quite contain.  Larson’s lost voice rises again.