tick, tick...Boom! - Review

Tick, Tick... Boom! is in limited theaters, and will debut on Netflix on Nov. 19.

When Tick, Tick… Boom! begins, Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield) — the real-life creator of the show of the same name, and of the 1996 Broadway smash Rent — works at a diner, is about a week from turning 30, and has yet to create any works of note. The year is 1990, and these two imposing round numbers hang over him like a dark cloud; the introductory song “30/90,” which Larson performs on the piano for an unseen audience, speaks to his panic as the clock counts down. The film that follows ends up being about a great many things, from Larson’s real life, to creative frustrations, to the nature of adaptation and, ultimately, to the then-worsening AIDS epidemic that would inform his most famous show. Despite this enormous breadth of scope, the aspect of the story which shines the brightest is Larson’s fears of failure during this week-long window, an intimate exploration owed to Garfield’s stellar performance (even if the actor’s singing voice is unremarkable). However, while the rest of Tick, Tick… Boom! remains watchable and engaging, it ends up trapped in an uncanny adaptational limbo, thanks to a narrative structure that undercuts its most impactful moments.

Directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda and written by Steven Levenson — who created Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen respectively — the film is an homage to Broadway and to Larson, who died a few weeks before turning 36 (and a day before Rent’s first public performance), but it’s almost too beholden to his work. Its structure is two-pronged. On one hand, it features a mostly straightforward musical narrative unfolding in New York City, and comprising brand-new staging and choreography based on Larson’s original songs. On the other, it features a frequently interspersed framing device in which Larson, accompanied by a few musicians and a pair of supporting vocalists, narrates the story’s events. The latter is a close approximation of the original show, Larson’s thread-bare, semi-autobiographical “rock monologue” about its own creation, in which he played every character (though it contains a few elements of the posthumous Broadway re-staging, in which one actor played Larson, and two others played everyone else). Essentially, Miranda and Levenson attempt to craft a transformative adaptation that visualizes Larson’s narrations in the form of a traditional movie musical, but they simultaneously attempt to film it in its original one-man form, using this stage performance to more closely examine the events that led up to it. It’s a bright spark that works on paper, but in execution, it ends up sucking some of the tension from Larson’s story, and some of the magic from the film’s own big ideas.

The central problem with this approach lies in the fact that the narrative of the original Tick, Tick… Boom! exists largely in the imagination. A story of Larson’s intense focus on his upcoming public workshop of Superbia (his dystopian rock opera that never came to be) and the way he pushes away his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), and his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús) — an actor turned ad executive, who Larson believes “sold out” — it is told almost entirely through Larson’s descriptive lyrics, which create a soulful overlap between literal events as they unfolded, and Larson’s subjective conception of them. He painted musical pictures that explored the dynamic between reality and the world in his head; thanks to this tension, the resultant show about pursuing artistic greatness at any cost wasn’t just autobiographical, but self-critical. In the movie version, that tension is bogged down by an unyielding literal-ism; almost every lyric is accompanied by an image that portrays exactly what the words have already described. It can’t help but feel like a waste of visual and thematic real estate.

There are a few exceptions, during which characters burst into thoroughly original dream-like dance sequences, but for the most part, when a song speaks of an event, an object or an interaction, the visuals aim to portray these things in their own isolated shots, as if to accompany the lyrics with explainers, rather than complementing them with related ideas or enhancing them with some kind of rhythmic feeling. The pictures feel focused on individual words, rather than on turns of phrase, and they capture ideas out of context rather than as threads in a moving tapestry. In the process, the dramatic tension held by the words — between dreams and reality — is rarely carried over to the images, inadvertently giving way to an entirely new tension: between Larson’s original songs and the filmed adaptation itself, which feels so dedicated to the lyrics as to be hampered by them.

This tension of adaptation, ironically, plays out in the form of the film breaking its own dramatic tension, by cutting away from emotionally charged moments so that Larson can further explain each interaction from his future vantage on stage. The result is two warring films that often feel incomplete: one where straightforward scenes are interrupted before they can play to their emotional conclusions, and another that attempts to re-create Larson’s intimate one-man show, but reduces it to a series of fractured intrusions, thus robbing it of its immersive power (it doesn’t help matters that nearly every scene is drenched in indiscriminate lens flare no matter the light source or emotional tone, a persistent distraction from Larson’s poetry).

However, while the film’s frantic narrative ends up working against it, its frantic central performance is its strongest suit. Garfield usually reads young on screen, but in Tick, Tick… Boom!, he plays Larson with the exhaustion of someone who’s lived a thousand lifetimes’ worth of rejection, and is now paralyzed by the possibility of being rejected again. His wrinkles and receding hairline certainly add to the effect of someone worn down by repeated failure, but what makes his performance so specifically “29” is the way he combines Larson’s mounting regret with a final, desperate shred of excitement and possibility. His tug-of-war between burnout and restlessness makes him seem like he’s charging towards some inevitable explosion, in the form of either enormous success, or a complete and utter breakdown. Just by watching his weary body language, you begin to fear and anticipate the eventual, inevitable “Boom!” once the clock ticks down.

The story often zips between ideas, rarely stopping to consider emotional beats or visual tableaus.

Despite the film’s other failings, this aspect of Larson’s story is its most powerful through line, and is also a major reason Miranda makes for a not-altogether-terrible fit. Miranda has only one prior directing credit to his name — an hour-long project from his teenage years — and while Tick, Tick… Boom! features only a few notable flourishes (his staging of frolic and movement within the confines of cramped New York apartments feels wonderfully true to life), the way he captures Garfield’s frazzled internal terror feels particularly precise. The story often zips between ideas, rarely stopping to consider emotional beats or visual tableaus (it strangely ignores its own dancers; there is but one fleeting group shot of note). However, when a given scene is about the central theme of 29-going-on-oblivion, the focus remains on Larson, and Larson alone. Miranda not only captures this central fear as a fixture of Larson’s present, but late into the film, he finally makes innovative use of the framing device and lets those same fears play out on stage — not through lyrics, but through fleeting moments of silence, focused on Garfield’s contemplative stares, as if Larson were inviting us to fill the gaps with lyrics of our own.

These moments are brief, but they are the film’s heart and soul. They also zero in on the major difference between Larson’s conception of Tick, Tick… Boom! and Miranda’s. Two and a half decades after Larson’s death, the story cannot help but take on a fatalistic tone, as if Larson is singing not only about his life, but his impending demise; his search in the interim becomes especially haunting, but when he finds brief glimmers of meaning, the result feels all the more valuable. It’s powerfully bittersweet. Hamilton, Miranda’s own Broadway hit, features similarly cogent expressions of death anxiety and the race to stake one’s place in history before it’s too late (“How do you write like you’re running out of time?”), and while his two-tiered adaption of Larson’s show rarely finds balance in individual moments, the bigger picture at least makes coherent sense.

While it adapts Larson’s story wholesale, it functions as a posthumous biopic based on an autobiography penned when the subject was still living. While the perspective Miranda brings to the film’s straightforward scenes is one of admiration (rather than the original’s more critical eye), his conception of Larson’s piano interludes feels not unlike his conception of Hamilton, which begins with other characters recalling the titular statesman after his death; perhaps the version of Larson that Garfield plays on stage isn’t Larson at all, but the idea of Larson that remains in the collective memory. The major difference, however, is while Hamilton offers a marginally more complicated portrait of Alexander Hamilton, as told through the eyes of the man who killed him, this approach in Tick, Tick… Boom! inadvertently un-complicates Larson in the process of memorializing him. It seeks to tell the story of those he pushed away and how he found his way back to them (his relationship with de Jesús’ Michael is especially moving, as is their power ballad duet “Real Life”), but the visual focus is so fractured and literal that each time it cuts to Larson on stage, in some future time, it pivots away from the story’s emotional complexities and sweeps them under the rug.

Instead of presenting us with Larson’s self-conception — as someone whose flaws hurt the people around him — Tick, Tick… Boom! places a greater importance on Miranda’s conception of him: as a genius creator preserved in Amber. While a more sentimental approach, it is, perhaps, a less honest one than Larson intended, despite the truth Garfield finds in his performance.