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. 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. It can’t help but feel like a waste of visual and thematic real estate.
Tik tik boom movie#
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. 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.
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. The central problem with this approach lies in the fact that the narrative of the original Tick, Tick… Boom! exists largely in the imagination. 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. 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. 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).
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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. 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. 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.ĭirected 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. 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).
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. 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. 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.
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