Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Director: Lin-Manuel Miranda
Quick Impressions:
tick, tick…BOOM! depressed me so much that I find writing about it difficult, but I do think Andrew Garfield has a real shot at winning Best Actor this year. In fact, so far, his is the only performance I’ve seen that seems conspicuously deserving of Best Actor. (I did like Matt Damon in The Last Duel, but I’m starting to get the idea that Ridley Scott, my sister, and I are the only people who even saw that movie!) (We liked it! It inspired us to go to Medieval Times for Thanksgiving! And then I didn’t have to cook or clean up! Thanks, Ridley Scott!) (I’m not slamming Garfield’s competition, by the way. I just haven’t seen his competition yet, though I am seeing King Richard tonight.)
When my sister was in high school, she had every intention of graduating, moving to New York, and becoming a musical theatre star after years of (extremely romantic) impoverished struggle. To prepare to realize these dreams she 1) got rid of her bed frame and slept with her mattress on the floor (for ambiance), 2) Constantly watched Friends and Sex and the City, and 3) Listened to the Original Cast Recording of Rent round the clock. It was pretty much the only music that played in our minivan to the point that it brainwashed our mother. I got extremely suspicious when I came home from college on a break and noticed Mom filling every silence by absent-mindedly singing snatches of “Tango: Maureen.”
I liked Rent, too, but I was surprised that my mother did. “Oh I don’t,” she explained to me, when I questioned her, “but I always let your sister play Rent in the car because it’s the only way I can bond with her.”
That was kind of sweet (except it made me mad because she never pretended not to hate music I wanted to listen to in the car!). (This convinced me that I needed to seem more capricious with my affections, but I could never bring myself to do it. Years later, however, Mom did spend several hours watching Rick and Morty with us when my older son tried to get us into the show. I was stunned that she seemed to enjoy it. Then a few days later, my sister told me on the phone, “So Mom super hates whatever show you were watching the other day! She told me about it for two hours!” Then I felt a surge of triumph! (“I knew she hated it!” I cried in glee, delighted that my time had come at last.))
At any rate, though my sister loved Rent the most, we all liked it (and my mom and I got very good at performing surprise duets of “Tango: Maureen.”) One of my best friends in college also adored Rent to the point of distraction. (At the beginning of our freshman year, when she found out it was coming to Houston, where she was from, she gushed loudly about knowing she needed tickets, yelling, “I was like Rent…me…Rent…me…Rent…me,” and someone who overheard thought she was offering to let people rent her (leading to a running joke that lasted for the rest of college).
So of course, I knew that Jonathan Larson had died in 1996, but I didn’t know until watching this movie that he died of aortic dissection. The movie had already managed to depress me, but that really shook me. Larson died of aortic dissection thought to be related to undiagnosed Marfan Syndrome. Just like my uncle. He died at 48 (Larson was just 35!). And my mother. (I don’t know that she had Marfan Syndrome. She wasn’t tall and gangly like her brother, but according to the autopsy, the cause of death was aortic dissection.) She was 68. (My dad comforts himself by musing that her lifestyle—never smoking, almost never drinking, regular exercise—perhaps prolonged her life. Maybe like her brother (who smoked like a chimney), she was born with a heart condition and only had so long. She always used to say, “I heard a doctor explain once that your heart only has so many beats in it.” That haunts me now. So does my regret that we didn’t do an autopsy on their father who very suddenly dropped dead of a suspected heart attack. (His sister also died from an aneurysm.) My sister had her heart checked and doesn’t have an aneurysm. I’ve been meaning to get that done, too, and I will as soon as I’m sure I want the results. Tick…tick…tick…tick….
The Good:
Jonathan Larson wrote two hit musicals before he died, tragically young. It was sobering to realize that I’m already too old to die young. And I haven’t written any hit musicals! (Of course, I’m not trying to write hit musicals. There’s that. But I do write novels, and I would like to be successful at that eventually. It’s sad to think of someone saying, “She died before she could ever write a work of genius.” And then someone asking, “She died young?” And the other person saying vaguely, “No…”) (The only comforting thing is that nobody talks about you if you don’t die young after producing a work of great genius.)
So I was watching this through a morose lens, thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve even failed at dying young!”
But for audience members who are not self-obsessed malcontents, tick…tick…BOOM! offers some great songs, a surprising array of cameos, and a stunning lead performance by Andrew Garfield.
At first, I couldn’t believe it was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut. I feel like every other thing I stream these days is a Lin-Manuel Miranda adaptation, but that’s a misleading impression. I immediately thought, “What about Hamilton?” He didn’t direct that. It was Thomas Kail. Then I thought, “Yes, but what about In the Heights?” He didn’t direct that either. It was Jon M. Chu (which I knew back when I saw it! That’s one of the reasons I’d been so excited to see it. I loved Crazy Rich Asians). Yes, Miranda’s on DuckTales and in Mary Poppins Returns. Moana was actually a really long time ago now (which doesn’t seem right to me). He didn’t direct any of that. (He also didn’t direct Encanto which I surely would have seen this past week if only my six-year-old loved going to movies like his brother and sister!) Miranda is, indeed, everywhere, but not as a director.
It surprised me that for his debut, Miranda wouldn’t choose to direct a show that he wrote himself. “Why would he do that?” I wondered. Fortunately, he did a ton of press about it, so I just watched several of his interviews and listened to him explain his motivations. He fell in love with Rent as a teenager and felt an even stronger connection to tick, tick…BOOM! later on. He called the show “a sneak preview of my twenties,” and explained the very personal draw of a young artist trying to answer the question, “How do we spend our time?”
I wish I had watched all of these interviews with Miranda before watching the movie. He’s totally selling me on the show. He’s very rousing. The concept doesn’t sound depressing at all the way he explains it. “It’s hard,” he says. “What you’re trying to do is very difficult, but if you’re okay with the world not noticing, and you’re just doing it because you love it…”
He sounds like my husband, who found the movie as rousing as I’m finding these interviews. He was getting the message, “Do what you love. Believe in your dream. Make your art.” And I was hearing, “Jonathan Larson is a genius, but you sort of suck. He died suddenly of aortic dissection, and maybe you will, too. We’ll see.” (I don’t think that’s the audience takeaway the movie was going for.)
Before hearing about this Netflix project, I was totally unfamiliar with tick, tick…BOOM! (which is a horrifically ironic name for an autobiographical show by someone who later died of aortic dissection). I had heard the title, but I didn’t even realize it was Larson’s show. (I would have, if I’d ever listened to it! From the very first song, the music is recognizably his.) All the people in my life who were obsessed with Rent never mentioned tick, tick…BOOM!
Maybe that’s because Larson performed it as a one-man show, and it only became a musical later on, after his death (and then, there were only three people in it)! (I find that unsurprising since I felt truly invested in just three characters, and the one who carries the whole thing is Garfield as Larson himself.) (I even said to my husband, unwittingly, “He’s so good that I’m not sure you even need the other people to tell this story!”)
Miranda’s version (written for the screen by Steven Levenson) features a full cast and is told as a traditional musical. We do, however, get frequent moments of Garfield’s Larson speaking and singing on stage (presumably to an audience and definitely to the movie’s audience). (These reminded me a bit of the way the narrative is progressed in Rob Marshall’s movie adaptation of Chicago and also a bit of those couch scenes in the show Modern Family.) It’s pretty easy to believe that this movie’s origins lie in a one-man show.
Garfield plays Larson as someone who always looks and sounds like he’s performing a musical. Clearly his whole life is a show. Even when the world around him becomes humdrum, the other people vaguely realistic, he’s always the lead in a musical. He just walks around in his own musical. I absolutely love his voice. Even his speaking voice seems to sing.
It’s incredibly easy to empathize with this character. (I don’t write songs, but I write novels, and I’m a lot like him. At one point his girlfriend gets mad at him for thinking about how he can turn their argument into a song, and we were all kind of exasperated with her. She has many legitimate grievances, but why would she be mad about that? He’s a songwriter! Of course, he’s writing a song! Not only does his real life inform and enrich his work, but writing songs is also how he processes his feelings and makes sense of his reality.)
I have a feeling that Jonathan Larson’s creative work is going to be remembered much longer than mine, so I wouldn’t say we’re alike in artistic stature, but we’re very similar in temperament. (People are always suggesting more stable, lucrative alternatives to him, and he’s like, “Hmm…but I don’t want to do that.”)
Jonathan himself dominates the whole movie. He is by far my favorite character. But my daughter and I agreed that the other character we liked is Jonathan’s friend Michael (very engagingly played by Robin de Jesus). My daughter did not like Alexandra Shipp’s Susan, on the other hand. She didn’t connect to the character at all, and the performance left her cold. I didn’t dislike Shipp, and I had way more sympathy for Susan than my daughter. (As presented in this movie, Jonathan has many remarkable qualities, but he’s not a great boyfriend. And it’s a bit ridiculous that he can’t have a direct conversation about moving out of the city which he obviously has no intention of ever doing!) I also enjoyed seeing Judith Light as Jonathan’s agent. And Vanessa Hudgens gives a performance that prompted a thousand questions from me. (Of course, they were all, “Is that Vanessa Hudgens?” I don’t know why I didn’t just look it up instead of asking again and again. It is her, and she’s quite good in this.)
As you might expect, the songs are catchy, and the film’s message is heartening (if you choose to embrace it as you should instead of focusing on the fact that you’re not as talented as Jonathan Larson, yet you’re also likely to die of aortic dissection any day).
Best Cameo:
This movie is overflowing with cameos. Even I realized this very early (which is odd because I’ve never been to a single Broadway show (in New York, I mean), but I still recognize some stage stars. (Who doesn’t know Bernadette Peters when you see her, for example?) Besides, you can just tell from the way the movie unfolds when the people you’re seeing are musical theatre stars.) (Getting the point requires no expertise in this area, trust me.) All the cameos are delightful. (It’s like Where’s Waldo in reverse. Instead of hunting for Waldo, you’re playing, “There’s someone!” Then you rack your brains trying to figure out if you know who it is. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you give up and look online.)
But from watching those interviews with Miranda just now, I learned that though Bradley Whitford plays Stephen Sondheim in tick, tick…BOOM!, the actual Sondheim appears (so to speak) late in the movie when he leaves a message on Jonathan’s answering machine. Not only did he rewrite his own lines in this scene, but he recorded them himself, both a lovely surprise for this movie and a fantastic curtain call for Sondheim, given his recent death.
Best Scene:
My favorite scene is Jonathan’s doomed attempt to work productively in the focus group. Both my husband and I identified so strongly with his reaction to the corporate world.
Best Scene Visually:
The song that Jonathan writes in the swimming pool provides the most visually innovative and memorable sequence of the film.
Best Song:
If you like cameos, it’s pretty hard to top the diner song “Sunday” which includes portions of Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.”
But both my husband and I liked the song inspired by a late argument with Susan. (I think it’s called “Therapy.”)
The Negatives:
One problem with tick, tick…BOOM! (for me) is the sense of frustration that it instills in the audience. I’ve seen a lot of semi-autobiographical movies about making The Thing, and usually at the end of them, you get to see the The Thing. So where is Superbia? All of those people who passed on it must not have been following Jonathan Larson around listening him rave about it and sing to himself. He devoted his twenties to writing that musical. I want to see it. Maybe it’s not good…but I don’t believe that. He’s Jonathan Larson, isn’t he? The genius behind Rent? Shouldn’t we get to see his juvenilia? I’ve read every scrap of everything by young Jane Austen. That early stuff is not her best, but it exists, and she’s Jane Austen, so there’s demand for it. When we read it, we make connections with her later, more acclaimed work. Everybody loves Rent. Why did Lin-Manuel Miranda decide to make tick, tick…BOOM! and not Superbia!
Now I’m not stupid. I understand that the show should leave us feeling frustrated because it’s about Larson’s frustrated attempt to produce a musical. He devoted all those years to a show, and nothing came of it. But it wasn’t nothing. His twenties still passed, and his life still mattered. Pouring yourself into something like that always matters. The process matters even if the product isn’t received the way you hope. So in tick, tick…BOOM! we get to see the process not the product. That’s fine. But I want to see the product, too. He wasn’t famous then, but he is now. Larson won’t be writing any more musicals, but he already wrote one that we haven’t seen. (Are we to believe that he cannibalized the best bits of it to use them as songs in tick, tick…BOOM!? I don’t care! I still want to see Superbia!)
So for me, the movie feels a bit anticlimactic. (That doesn’t seem fair of me. “Anticlimactic, Sarah?” I’m now yelling at myself. “He died! His heart exploded! What more do you want?” (I want to see Superbia!))
Another slight problem I had (other my own unwarranted despair) is that Garfield gives such an amazing performance as Jonathan—incandescent, vocally rich, larger-than-life—that everything else in the movie seems pretty dull by comparison. I might feel differently when I watch it again (which I almost certainly will since it’s occurring to me now that I might not have been in the best frame of mind when I watched this the first time). I didn’t find these songs as catchy as the ones in Rent (although “Johnny Can’t Decide” is stuck in my head at the moment, making somewhat of a liar of me), but on a second watch, perhaps they’ll grow on me.
Also, just a small thing, in terms of Lin-Manuel Miranda related movie musicals, I enjoyed In the Heights far more earlier this year.
Overall:
Perhaps the best thing about tick, tick…BOOM! is that it prompted me to watch all of these interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda which I’ve found thoroughly delightful and morale boosting. Well, no, the best thing about the movie is Andrew Garfield’s outstanding lead performance. And the second best thing about the movie is that it gives us a brief, autobiographical glimpse of Jonathan Larson, the genius who wrote Rent and tragically did not live to see his work’s spectacular success. If you like musicals, you’d a fool not to see this one. It’s on Netflix. You have no excuse not to watch it (unless you don’t subscribe to Netflix, in which case, I advise you to do the next best thing and spend an hour or so watching interviews with director Lin-Manuel Miranda online. They’re very heartening.)