Tick, tick... BOOM!
Cert 12A
★★★★★
In cinemas now, on Netflix from November 19
After turning America’s War of Independence into an unlikely hit stage musical, Tony Award-winning composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) makes his directorial debut with an intimate film about another Tony Award-winning composer.
In 1996, playwright Jonathan Larson died from an aortic aneurysm, 24 hours before the first public preview of Rent, the hit musical that would win him his posthumous accolade.
Six years earlier, he performed a selfpenned “rock monologue” where he sang about his early midlife crisis and his struggle to make a name for himself in late 1980s New York.
After his death, tick tick... BOOM! was adapted into a Broadway play (with one production starring Miranda), but the film recreates the earlier 1990 performance and expands it into a full movie musical.
It follows Jon (Andrew Garfield) as he tries to finish Superbia, a show based on George Orwell’s 1984 which Larson laboured over throughout his 20s.
We first witness Garfield’s musical talents
as he performs on a piano with a band and two singers (Joshua Henry and Vanessa Hudgens) to a small audience in New York. After opening song 30/90 vents his frustrations that he will turn 30 without completing his masterpiece, Miranda takes us to Jon’s dilapidated apartment and the diner where he waited tables.
As he prepares for a career-breaking showcase of Superbia’s songs, Jon copes with a disintegrating relationship with girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), and also losing his closest friends to HIV/AIDS.
Garfield is excellent and Larson’s powerful songs are wonderfully staged.
But the film’s greatest strength is its sense of time and place. Miranda clearly understands Larson’s struggle and the artistic community he belonged to.
It’s his most touching film yet. It also feels like his most personal.