tick, tick… BOOM!

Have you ever imagined Andrew Garfield starring in a biography about a musical? Tick, tick... boom! Was the film you were looking for. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the famed writer/actor from Hamilton and his collaboration with Disney, directed the film.

Tick, tick... boom! Was composed for the stage by Jonathan Larson right before he began work on his magnum opus, Rent. It's a very personal play about a failing musical theater writer in New York in the 1990s, attempting to find the right words and music to connect with producers, audiences, and himself. For the better part of a decade, he's been working on a passion project called Superbia, a sci-fi sort of thing that is brimming with youthful zeal but is perhaps too unwieldy in all its enormous swings. He's making progress, yet he's also stuck.

Tick, tick... boom! Includes songs from Superbia, but the latter performance also features its own songs, which Larson originally played onstage. Tick, tick... boom! appears unfilmable from many perspectives, a tangled patchwork of life and a creative furnace with little cinematic potential. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Steven Levenson (Dear Evan Hansen) have found innovative ways to shoot Larson's gangly riot in a sensible and sad manner. Miranda has identified Larson as a huge influence on his embryonic technique, and that ardor and comprehension are palpable throughout his debut feature.

Tick, tick... boom! Is a modest film about big things, rather than a musical extravaganza. There's enough of high emotion and theatrical flourish in Miranda's performance, but she does so with a deceptively humble demeanor. Andrew Garfield captures the itch and worries of a post-adolescent facing maturity with sensitivity. Garfield's work here is the clearest distillation of his movie star appeal, despite its theatricality.

Miranda avoids giving us a foreboding sense of Larson's coming death, which would have cast the entire encounter in a bitter foreshadowing of tragedy. Tick, tick... boom! Transports you to Manhattan three decades ago.

Staff:

Directed by: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Written by: Steven Levenson

Based on: Tick, Tick... Boom! by Jonathan Larson

Produced by: Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Julie Oh, Julie Larson, and Lin-Manuel Miranda

Starring: Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesús, Joshua Henry, Judith Light, and Vanessa Hudgens.

Cinematography: Alice Brooks

Edited by: Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum

Music by: Jonathan Larson

Production companies: Imagine Entertainment and 5000 Broadway Productions

Distributed by: Netflix

Release date: November 12, 2021

Running time: 121 minutes