Mark Reviews Movies: TICK, TICK... BOOM!

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 12, 2021

Jonathan Larson's first professionally staged musical was a work of autobiography, written by a man alive with talent and potential and an unwavering drive to accomplish something before the clock of his own expectations expires. Director Lin-Manuel Miranda (making his feature directorial debut) and screenwriter Steven Levenson's film adaptation of that musical is also that, but Tick, Tick... Boom! has the ticking clock in the main character's mind communicating a more melancholy sense of percussion.

Larson would be become widely famous, acclaimed, and awarded only a few years after the events depicted in this story with Rent, the stage sensation he created. The writer/composer, though, wouldn't live to see his lifelong dream fulfilled. He died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1996—just shy of his 36th birthday and the night before that show premiered on an off-Broadway stage. There's a terrible, cosmic cruelty in that fact.

Miranda's film opens with acknowledging that, while this is a story about a struggling artist finding his way amidst self-doubt and self-sabotage and plenty of professional setbacks, it's also that other story—about a man who wouldn't live to see the fruits of all that internal and external struggling. Everyone can relate to and dread this, and perhaps, people of creative ambitions, such as Miranda and everyone who appears in this loving tribute to both a specific man and a general mindset, understand the particular degrees of optimism, uncertainty, and tragedy defined by Larson's story. That understanding comes through in this film.

It is partially an authentic and engaging adaptation of Larson's original musical, which was initially staged off-off-Broadway back in 1990, with Larson at a piano (Footage of Larson performing the piece during the credits gives us a sense of how accurate the re-staging is here). This version adds a band and a couple of accompanying singers, as defined by the show's posthumous re-working.

It's mostly, though, a dramatization of the story within the monologues and the songs, as an aspiring musical theater composer/lyricist named Jon navigates the responsibilities and expectations of his personal life within the self-imposed requirements of making it as professional writer of musical theater. For better and for worse, the career stuff always wins.

On stage and in those dramatic flashbacks, Jon is played by Andrew Garfield, who embodies a specific brand of nervous-on-the-edge-of-manic energy and performs the songs with a similar level of gusto. Even though anyone who would have seen Larson's show back in those initial days of its staging would have been able to decipher its autobiographical intent, Levenson and Miranda make that clear at the start. This isn't just Jon's story. It's also Larson's, as it happened—except for the stuff he made up, an actor notes with a verbal wink.

Jon, living in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, has been working on a sci-fi rock musical for the past eight years. With his 30th birthday approaching, he's more and more worried that the career he has always wanted will elude him. By day, he works in a diner, and at night and on his off days, Jon tries to arrange a workshop of that musical, hoping to gain the attention and financing of some Broadway producer.

Meanwhile, Michael (Robin de Jesús), his best friend from childhood and soon-to-be ex-roommate, has had enough of rejection after rejection as an actor, so he takes a job at an advertising firm. Jon could work there, too, if he wanted, writing jingles for a steady paycheck. That would be defeat in Jon's mind. Also, there's the matter of his girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), who has been offered a job as a dance instructor at a school in rural Massachusetts. He could go with her or ask her to stay, but whatever thoughts he may have on the matter aren't clear. There's still another song to write for the musical, after all, and Jon can't even decide on the first word. The clock in his head keeps ticking away the wasted time.

The basic schematic of Levenson's screenplay here, going back and forth between the stage show and past events played straight or with the heightened reality of a musical number, is sound. Miranda, who is no stranger to theater (to understate matters) and is becoming less a stranger to movies, keenly understands the distinct energies of the stage and a movie musical.

Those scenes of Garfield and his on-stage co-stars (Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry, who, in the flashbacks, also play an actor in the workshop and a friend, respectively) performing Larson's show for a small audience are intimate (lots of close-ups) and feel in-the-moment. When the more straightforward story breaks for a song, Miranda allows for diversely styled sequences—broadly stagey (Jon and Michael singing and dancing in slow-motion within a fancy deluxe apartment complex), minimalistic (Jon sitting at a piano on the stage of a vacant amphitheater, lamenting what he has done to his life), lovingly imaginative (a time-out amidst the hustle of a Sunday brunch at the diner, in a song that—likely thanks to Miranda's involvement—might possess the most impressive chorus of background singers ever assembled for a standalone musical number).

On the surface, this is a fine, if familiar, story about creative obsession. Just beneath Tick, Tick... Boom!—and, as the story has to grapple with the absence of its creator, right up front—is a tender tribute to Larson, a man who knew what he wanted, understood and struggled with the cost of that dream, and never had the chance to see it achieved. The film gives the distinct sense of a creative community accomplishing it for him.

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