Review: tick, tick… BOOM! Is a Meta Dissection of Jonathan Larson’s Artist Brain

With his feature-length directorial debut, tick, tick… BOOM!, Lin-Manuel Miranda never quite resolves the tension between well-attended wake and intimate memoir in paying tribute to the late Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield), writer and composer of the rock musical Rent. Throughout the film, the creator of Hamilton and In the Heights delivers a cornucopia of surprises for musical theater fans—not so much a series of Easter Eggs as an omelet buffet—including a cavalcade of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from acclaimed theater writers and performers showing up to honor Larson.

With its invitation list extended to so many theatrical legends—some of whom Larson idolized himself and some of whom, Miranda included, owe their success in part to his mainstreaming of contemporary rock musical theater—Miranda’s film positions Larson as both a vital descendant and ancestor, a singular figure in a singular art form. Far from just a tribute piece, though, tick, tick… BOOM! also explicitly asserts that the story is being told as Larson intended, through his own work, with his own voice, on his own terms.

Dear Evan Hansen’s Steven Levenson’s restless screenplay adapts a musical monologue that Larson wrote and performed about the failure of Superbia, his rock adaptation of Orwell’s 1984. After Larson’s death, playwright David Auburn developed the piece into a popular three-person musical, focusing on the characters that Larson had fictionalized in his self-portrait: his long-suffering dancer girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), and his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús), who’s just abandoned acting for the security of the corporate world.

The film leans first and foremost into what it means to be a single-minded writer: Jonathan can barely sleep until he’s found the right words and melodies, and he struggles to stay fully connected to the real world while his imagination competes for his attention. As they embrace after a ferocious argument, Susan catches Jonathan gingerly trying out a melody, using her back as a keyboard, already turning his feelings about their conflict into a new song.

With a nod to Cabaret, Miranda frames several of the songs as diegetic performances that cut back and forth between Jonathan’s concert performance of tick, tick… BOOM! (with some thrilling backup vocals from Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry, who also appear as actor friends throughout) and the scenes to which the songs respond. Throughout, Miranda’s direction is clear, lively, and clever, as his crystalline writing elsewhere might portend, and his witty, wise work timing the cinematography to the score often recalls the musical precision in Jon M. Chu’s visual treatment of Miranda’s In the Heights earlier this year.

There’s also one particularly stunning moment, a shot of Jonathan swimming in a pool that transforms, in aerial view, into a musical score. It’s the sort of creative illumination of a composer’s mind in motion that moves tick, tick… BOOM! toward a pure distillation of the artist’s brain. That’s a brain, though, that wasn’t quite fully developed yet. Larson’s pre-Rent music shares that score’s familiar driving energy even if his lyrics, in their frequent fragmentation of thoughts, sometimes suggest a freight train of images and ideas coming on too fast to ever cohere. Miranda and Levenson graciously show Jonathan scribbling down phrases that will become the film’s catchiest tune, “Louder Than Words,” linking the enigmatic lyrics to specific experiences that lend the lovely song a logic that it might otherwise lack.

The performances, across the board, are boisterously sweet, from de Jesús’s supportive Michael to Shipp’s frustrated Susan. Garfield, with an effervescent energy sometimes reminiscent of his recent Tony-winning performance as Prior Walter in the revival of Angels in America, never shies away from playing up Jonathan’s sometimes obnoxious vanity. “I’m the future of musical theater,” he tells a finance bro at a party with a sincerity that makes it clear that he believes that his success will be non-negotiable. And it’s hard not to share in his friends’ awe of his creative confidence even if hanging out with him seems like a pain.

Miranda takes on Larson’s cockiness and self-centeredness head-on, with an admirable willingness to avoid hero-worship. The film implies that it’s the lessons Jonathan learns at the apex of the AIDS epidemic as his dear friends die around him that force him to grow up and recognize that his success isn’t the urgent matter of life and death that he thinks it is.

The suggestion that the queer community’s suffering catalyzed the straight Larson’s self-actualizing may not provide the film’s most persuasive storytelling. But the tougher knot to untie is that we can’t help knowing that Jonathan was right, as the clock really was ticking. The inescapability of his death, from an aortic dissection on the morning of Rent’s first Off-Broadway performance, means that tick, tick… BOOM! carries an added, omnipresent weight. Mortality rubs up against everything here, especially the promise of infinite potential that a generous Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford, in a fairly convincing impression) prophesies.

Of course, that potential, as tick, tick… BOOM! suggests, would be realized—if only for the final months of Larson’s life—in Rent, and we last see Jonathan taking the advice of his agent (Judith Light) to write what he knows: that impulse will beget first this autobiographical story and then the groundbreaking musical that revolves around the lives of broke musicians and filmmakers and actors striving for artistic perfection in New York City. Death and glory, then, keep close company in the film, two predetermined outcomes lingering just off screen. tick, tick… BOOM! trips gently over its dual ambitions to empower its late subject to tell his own story while simultaneously infusing itself with the retrospective knowledge of the twist ending—both tragic and sublime—that Larson could not have foreseen.