Garfield pays splendid tribute to a ‘Rent’ legend
“Tick, Tick … Boom!,” a 2021 movie based on a 2001 stage musical retooled from a 1990 one-man show, tells a simple story with a complicated genealogy. The one-man show told the story of a musical that was ultimately never produced, written by a guy whose next musical became a Broadway phenomenon. And now it’s a Netflix movie, directed by the creative force behind a completely different Broadway phenomenon.
Got all that? No worries if not. The movie, blessedly and sometimes blissfully, is easier to watch than it is to put into words.
And that’s only fitting, since “Tick, Tick … Boom!” itself concerns an epic case of writer’s block. Those jittery ticktick noises punctuating the soundtrack are the sounds of a playwright racing the clock; they’re also a reminder that every life has its own undisclosed deadline. We’re in New York City in 1990, awash in cassette mixtapes and chunky Macintosh computers. That’s Andrew Garfield as the musical-theater wunderkind Jonathan Larson – gifted, irrepressible, cash-strapped and a week shy of his 30th birthday. He’s still a few years away from writing his 1996 magnum opus, “Rent,” which means he’s also a few years away from his untimely death from an aortic aneurysm, just a day before “Rent’s” first preview performances.
The rest is theater history. A “La Boheme”-inspired rock opera about starving artists, Manhattan real estate and the AIDS crisis became an im
probable success story, a medium-redefining hit and a lasting tribute to its late creator. Years after Larson’s death, his 1990 semi-autobiographical one-man show, “Tick, Tick … Boom!” (originally titled “Boho Days”), spawned another tribute: The playwright David Auburn reworked it into a three-character piece that premiered off-Broadway in 2001. Twenty years later, it’s inspired the feature directing debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who played Larson in a 2014 revival and whose hardscrabble journey to musical-theater stardom bears some resemblance to Larson’s own.
In pulling together elements from both stage versions of
“Tick, Tick … Boom!” and from Larson’s entire body of work, Miranda and screenwriter Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) have made an inspired jumble, a surprisingly graceful Franken-Steinway of a movie. It’s framed by scenes of Larson’s alter ego, Jon (Garfield), at the piano, performing on a stage with a band and two singers (Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry), a device that typifies the movie’s fluid, unfussy blend of theatrical and cinematic forms. (Miranda’s expert collaborators include the director of photography Alice Brooks; the editors Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum; and the executive music producers Alex Lacamoire, Bill Sherman and Kurt Crowley.)
But for most of the movie, we are bobbing alongside Jon in a New York playfully alive with the sound of his music and the rough-and-tumble spontaneity of Ryan Heffington’s choreography.
We are also caught up in something of a “Rent” origin story, which I hope doesn’t scare you off. As a show, “Rent” proved nearly as divisive as it was popular: Maybe it enraptured you with its earnest, impassioned paean to art, love and East Village living, and maybe it struck you as a loathsome example of mass culture devouring the counterculture (“commodified faux bohemia on a platter,” as Carina Chocano put it in her Times review of the lousy 2005
movie adaptation). In any event, you needn’t have any fondness for “Rent” – though a little doesn’t hurt – to be taken with the affectionately cracked mirror that “Tick,
Tick … Boom!” holds up to it.
Some elements from the show exist here in early, prototypical form: grungy Manhattan digs and power outages, hand-wringing artist debates about staying the course versus selling out, the onset of sickness and the grim specter of death. The crucial difference here is that, rather than speaking and singing through his characters, Larson is now one of them, and his presence lends this material a more dynamic focus and a sharper point of view.
As played by an impressively full-voiced, floopy-haired Garfield, this Jon is more than just a persuasive double for his creator and real-life counterpart. A terrifically appealing screen presence and a more versatile actor than some might guess from his tenure as Spider-Man (speaking of extraordinarily gifted New Yorkers with work-life balance issues and a hard time making it on Broadway), Garfield fully conveys the tension and drive of a creative mind in full if sometimes frustrated flower.