Tick, Tick… Boom: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s poignant adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s story

Even reading those words in your head, there’s no chance that melody doesn’t rise from your subconsciousness, where it’s penetrated and stayed. That’s the indelible mark of Jonathan Larson.

Seasons of Love, the most famous song from Broadway musical Rent, was written by Larson, who at the age of 35 unexpectedly died from an aortic dissection the day of Rent’s first public preview.

Larson’s legacy was a globally successful production which ran for 12 years on Broadway.

His work also changed the industry and audiences’ conception of what a stage musical could be.

He just wasn’t around to see it.

Almost 20 years after Larson’s death, Lin-Manuel Miranda would, again, change the direction and expectations of stage musicals with his blockbuster production, Hamilton.

So, it makes a lot of sense that Miranda would choose Tick, Tick… Boom as his feature directorial debut, adapting Larson’s only other produced musical, a semi-autobiographical story about an aspiring theatre composer as he nears his 30th birthday, feeling the burden of time.

Time, and its attendant pressures and weight, is a construct that hangs over Larson’s work, and also over Miranda’s Hamilton.

That hunger and urgency for creative success, of being acknowledged and recognised, runs through Tick, Tick… Boom, imbued in every fibre of Andrew Garfield’s vibrant performance as Jonathan (to distinguish from Larson, the real-life one).

The film speeds along on Jonathan’s sense that time is running out.

Jonathan is a gregarious and ambitious 29-year-old composer who’s been working on his play, Superbia, for the past eight years. He has an upcoming workshop in which he’ll present his work, with the hope that a producer will finance his production.

But he needs one more song, and he just can’t seem to get it out.

Consumed by the challenges and the dread that he’s running out of time, Jonathan neglects his girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who’s been offered a job outside the city, and his best friend Michael (Robin de Jesus), a former actor who gave up his dream for a well-paid job in advertising.

Jonathan thinks he’s already too old to make it – his idol Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford) mounted his first production at 27.

Miranda, perhaps with the insight of his own experiences of that desperate yearning, has deftly crafted a film that gives a real sense of raw artistic desire. He’s not a showy director, instead allowing Garfield and Larson’s music to be the real stars.

Tick, Tick… Boom is framed similarly to Larson’s stage musical, in which Jonathan sits at a piano with a back-up band and two vocalists (Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry) as he narrates his story, which in the film is expanded in flashbacks.

Because you get that direct narration from Jonathan, as well as the emotional revelations of the songs, the character’s interiority is essentially external – and it works. It may be heart-on-your-sleeve stuff, but the genre and form support it.

Garfield, who despite being 38 still retains his boyish charm, is not known for being a vocalist and he impresses – at least to this untrained ear – while co-stars de Jesus and Shipp also belt their hearts out.

There are cameos and supporting turns from stage luminaries including Judith Light, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Joel Grey, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Adam Pascal, Phillipa Soo, Phylicia Rashad, Bebe Neuwirth, Renee Elise Goldsberry and Bernadette Peters, while Pose star Mj Rodriguez plays one of Jonathan’s co-stars.

More than a crowd-pleasing musical with earnest, poignant peaks and earworm songs, Tick, Tick… Boom is about the cruelty of time. And the loss of friends to AIDS, which becomes a central theme of Rent, is always on the edges, another reminder of how ephemeral life is.

Jonathan’s conception of how little time he has to “make it” may lead him – textually – to the realisation that the brief, fleetingness of it isn’t so much a tragedy as impetus to use it.

But ever present is the knowledge – explicit in the opening scenes of the film – that Larson really did run out of it, way too soon. Tick, Tick… Boom is a moving tribute to the legacy he left.

Rating: 3.5/5

Tick, Tick… Boom is on Netflix from Friday, November 19 at 7pm AEDT

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Originally published as Tick, Tick… Boom: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s poignant adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s story