“Tick, tick…BOOM!” is the Jonathan Larson Movie of Our Dreams
[This essay contains spoilers.]
No movie has ever hit home for me like tick, tick…BOOM!, the new film adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical, but I could have told you that before I saw it. I can imagine an alternate-universe tick, tick…BOOM! that I might have anticipated with trepidation, but to know that Lin-Manuel Miranda was making this movie was to know that it was going to be okay: There could be missteps, but he’ll take good care of the material.
As it turns out, there are no missteps, at least none detectable to me on breathless, weepy first viewing. To me it’s easily the truest cinematic depiction of what it means to be an artist — but so much of it feels like a literal depiction of my own experiences — which have been informed by choices inspired by Jonathan Larson and Rent and tick, tick…BOOM! — I just don’t know! I wonder how the movie plays for people who have not been in an intense relationship with Jonathan Larson since 1996. I think it’s probably a great film, no matter who you are, or how you feel about Rent or Larson or Miranda or musicals or any of this. Certainly, the central performance by Andrew Garfield is a remarkable thing in its own way, a great actor taking big risks and doing something extraordinary.
Concerning the protean director, it’s not just that Lin-Manuel Miranda is a great artist who did a great job adapting a great work (though this is all true). The film is part of an ongoing conversation between a deceased artist and his foremost creative legatee. Miranda has repeatedly acknowledged Rent as the show that made him realize he could write musicals, and it’s impossible to imagine the scores, or the stagecraft, of In the Heights and Hamilton without the example of Rent. And now that the earth-shaking success of Hamilton has made Miranda a multihyphenate superstar who can be handed the reins of a major motion picture, he has given us two beautiful hours in the presence of Jonathan Larson, someone we love and miss but never met.
At the core of the movie is a basically faithful adaptation of Larson’s “rock monologue,” and its later adaptation by David Auburn for a cast of three. But thanks to some bravura conceptual design and editing, the material is wrapped in the kaleidoscopic Jonathan Larson biopic / performance film / documentary of our dreams. In collaboration with screenwriter Steven Levenson and theatre historian / Larson expert Jennifer Ashley Tepper, Miranda has packed the film with lovingly rendered details of Larson’s experience and his surroundings, and, crucially, his work. There’s a lot of Jonathan Larson music in the film (much more than is on the soundtrack album), including lots of scoring, incidental, and diegetic music, and more of Superbia than most of us have ever heard.
In addition to all of the faithful realism, there are several fanciful sequences set in Jonathan’s imagination, and an inexhaustible supply of clever ways to cut between these and some dynamic film of Garfield’s Jonathan performing tick at New York Theatre Workshop, with two vocalists (Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry) and a band. (It’s sort of a cross between Larson’s original show and the familiar three-person version.)
As conceived by Larson, tick, tick…BOOM! is in conversation with Stephen Sondheim’s work. Sondheim himself figures in the story (in the film he’s played by Bradley Whitford, plus a voice cameo from the real Sondheim), and there are nods to Company in tick’s structure and observational New York comedy. Like Merrily We Roll Along, tick depicts young striving artists in New York, and is preoccupied with the tension between art and commerce. Sunday in the Park with George is ever-present in the subtext of tick, and is directly pastiched in the song “Sunday.” (The film does a nice job setting up the reference for anyone who needs it.) This has always been a delightful number— Larson took Sondheim’s glorious hymn to the beauty of art and applied it to his day job, waiting tables at the Moondance Diner. In the movie, it becomes a spectacular set piece, packed with the most thrilling of many Broadway cameos. (Slate has a list; so does BroadwayWorld.) I dearly wish I could believe that somehow, somewhere, Jonathan Larson knows that Bernadette Peters performed in his “Sunday,” too.
As with so many aspects of this movie, the recreation of the Moondance Diner alone might have been enough to make me cry.
It’s so unlikely that this film should exist; the wild, decades-long series of wonderful and horrible events which conspired to make it possible could never have been planned. But this was also true of tick, tick…BOOM! in its Off Broadway version. In Boho Days: The Wider Works of Jonathan Larson, J. Collis points out that “Larson meant for tick to be a personal showcase to highlight his skills and spend some time performing, rather than an enduring piece of theatre, and it likely would have been fondly—but fleetingly—remembered, were it not for the show’s autobiographical reflection providing insight after Larson’s death.” Through tick’s second life as “the other Jonathan Larson musical,” Larson became not just a musical theatre creator, but a character.
Through all these layers of legend, it can be surprising to consider that he was also a real person. Now, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Steven Levenson, Andrew Garfield, and their collaborators, Jonathan seems more knowable than he ever has, to those of us who didn’t actually know him. It’s nice to finally meet him.
His death has always lurked in the shadows of Rent, a horrifyingly sad ending to counter the show’s happy one. Tick, though no less haunted by his death, winds up having the opposite effect: it’s the eventual success of Rent that lurks in tick’s shadows, providing a supertextual happy ending. When Jon, in the movie, asserts that he is the future of musical theatre, we don’t just admire his confidence; we know for a fact that he was right.
Art survives, and the idea of being an artist is still worth fighting for. Almost all of us grapple with the challenges Jonathan faced. Rent is the vindicating fruit of those struggles, the glorious anthem composed between shifts at the diner. In tick, tick…BOOM! the struggles themselves are the anthem.
The film couldn’t have come at a better time. The dystopian Superbia, as the film makes clear, was prescient about some of what’s happened in the years since Larson left us, including social media and wildly expanded corporatization. The AIDS crisis, as depicted in tick and Rent, resonates with the current pandemic. In our oversaturated media culture, life is no easier for artists, whether they wait tables or work in ad agencies. What Jonathan was saying so urgently is even more true today, and the tick, tick…BOOM! movie is a thoroughly satisfying opportunity to turn around, and listen to that boy’s song.
