There’s a lot of tragedy baked into “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” the soul-stirring new movie musical on Netflix.
Its main character is Jonathan Larson, the brilliant young “Rent” composer who died of an aortic aneurysm in the early morning on the day his iconic musical premiered at the East Village’s New York Theatre Workshop in 1996. He was just 35, and never lived to see “Rent” move to Broadway and become a worldwide phenomenon.
“Tick, Tick,” which Larson wrote as a one-man show for himself in 1990, takes place well before that sad day, but his death movingly hovers over every scene.
Running time: 115 minutes.
Rated PG-13 (some strong language, some suggestive material and drug references.) In select theaters and on Netflix.
In the new musical, Larson, played by an exceptional Andrew Garfield, struggles to finish a boundary-breaking musical while his friends are dying of AIDS all around him. He can’t afford to pay the bills for his shabby Greenwich Village walk-up and the power blows. At a spry 30 years old, he chillingly says that his “time is running out.”
Larson could never have known he’d write one of the most famous American musicals ever, but we watch as he unintentionally does just that.
Throughout the movie, for instance, he jots down the frenetic thoughts that flood his mind, a few notes of music here and there, and they all add up to “Rent” — his rock ’n’ roll spin on “La Boheme” about young New Yorkers trying to make art and survive a plague.
Andrew Garfield and Alexandra Shipp co-star in the new film. NetflixThe entertaining and heartbreaking film is not merely a sister show, though. While Rentheads and Broadway fans will certainly connect to it on a deeper level than those who only know Idina Menzel as Elphaba, not Maureen, “Tick, Tick” is a terrific, moving, propulsive film on its own terms. It’s about New York, art, life and love.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, as it turns out, can compose “Hamilton” and direct great movies.
The stage show started out as more of a rock concert than a traditional musical, so Miranda blends footage of Garfield onstage backed by musicians with realistic scenes set in Larson’s apartment, at a diner where he works or in the rehearsal studio as he tweaks his futurist ill-fated musical “Superbia.” The back-and-forth bothered me for the first 10 minutes, which are a tad stiff, but it settles in fast.
Larson is a perfect role for Garfield, who does the best work of his career. I’m convinced the actor has always been uncomfortable as an action star and red-carpet regular. You can tell he’d rather be a Bohemian like Larson was — working in the theater for pennies and drinking wine out of Solo cups on a downtown roof ’til 3 a.m. He’s honest and personal and sings so well, you forget he was Spidey.
He also forms sweet bonds with all his co-stars, but especially girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who wants to take a staff job in the Berkshires, and Michael (Robin de Jesús), his gay best friend who leaves acting behind for a lucrative advertising gig.
Like Garfield, Miranda is close to the subject matter, being a composer himself, who as it happens was also discovered by the producers of “Rent.” His is a detailed, unglamorous look into a young New York writer’s struggles. He also packs the movie full of Broadway actors, producers, composers, music directors and more whom buffs will be happy to see.
At first, I thought the cameos were a gimmick, but during a scene at the diner, it hits you: Everybody working on Broadway today owes a debt of gratitude to “Rent” and Jonathan Larson.
