Anticipation.
This ‘Rent’-head is curious to know more about Larson’s own vie bohème.
Enjoyment.
Difficult to form a cogent thought during this uninterrupted onslaught of high-energy tunes.
In Retrospect.
A less literal, slightly more self-aware adaptation might have better suited the material.
Time seems to have been a particular obsession of Jonathan Larson, creator of hit Broadway show ‘Rent’, and it dictates the structure (and title) of his earlier effort, the more overtly autobiographical ‘Tick, Tick… Boom!’. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breathless screen adaptation itself feels pressed for time – you’d be forgiven for wishing the film would slow down a little. (Is this what the wretched playback speed function on Netflix is for?)
What was initially a small-scale, one-man stand-up fused with musical performance is fleshed out into a filmed show-biopic hybrid whose sheer intensity will keep you stuck to your sofa, for better or worse. Andrew Garfield finds the perfect outlet for his limitless energy and sometimes over-the-top theatrics in the role of the impassioned musical composer Larson, who, on the eve of his 30th birthday, begins prepping for the workshop presentation of ‘Superbia’, an ambitious sci-fi spectacle he has been working on for eight years.
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But this film isn’t about that show (which was never fully produced), and Larson is best known for his portrait of New York “bohemia” in ‘Rent’ – the very world he himself inhabited. Indeed, one of the most interesting but least explored aspects of Tick, Tick… Boom! is Larson’s journey to understanding that he better “write what he knows,” which the film presents not as an artistic epiphany but as the more banal and sentimental realisation that one should enjoy where one is, rather than project oneself into a different time, place or world.
Like most ideas in Tick, Tick… Boom!, this one is better expressed in ‘Rent’. In the song ‘Seasons of Love’ from the latter show, characters ponder how one should measure a life: “In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee…” It’s an almost childishly simple sentiment, but one which, within the show’s allegorical format and through its larger-than-life characters, becomes rather touching. In ‘Rent’, this slightly exaggerated mode allows Larson to get away with a lot of similarly naïve heartstring tugging; its absence in the more reality-bound Tick, Tick… Boom! is glaring.
While the singing may be practically constant in Miranda’s film, it is enmeshed in the day-to-day life of Garfield’s Larson. We are by his side practically the entire time as he struggles to come up with one last song for ‘Superbia’ and lets the rest of his life fall apart in the process: his girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) understandably grows impatient, his best friend Michael (Robin de Jesus) feels ignored, and the bills go unpaid. Tick, Tick… Boom!’s close study of the creative process is perhaps more evocative on stage, where the collateral damage is out of view.
Miranda, by contrast, chooses to show it all. It is difficult at the best of times to care about how someone else creates their art; even more so when that method proves so destructive. To Larson’s credit, this is a lesson he apparently learned by the time he made ‘Rent’, where the laments of the show’s artists are rightfully derided by their friends with real problems and the public at large.
In both shows/films, however, Larson’s writing clumsily addresses some of those real problems – namely homophobia and the AIDS epidemic. But this film’s decision to stick to an aesthetic of realism (with characters walking around, as opposed to just one man on stage) brings out this awkwardness even more. On stage, the struggles of Larson’s gay roommate Michael would naturally be perceived as filtered through Larson’s own perspective; here, communicated directly by Michael, they feel like gratuitous ways of ramping up the emotion.
Crucially for a musical, the move to a more over-the-top register in ‘Rent’ also made for better songs. The show tunes in Tick, Tick… Boom! might have also benefited from being given a little more space to breathe. While this is ultimately a film about taking the time to appreciate what you have and enjoying every step of your way, the overall impression remains one of haste and only occasionally contagious overexcitement.
