Film Review: Tick, Tick... Boom shows the torment of a young creative who struggles with intimacy

Andrew Garfield and Alexandra Shipp in Tick, Tick... Boom, streaming on Netflix. Photo / Netflix

Tick, Tick … Boom (M, 115 mins), streaming now on Netflix
Directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda

Tick, Tick…Boom is the true story of Jonathan Larson (1960 – 1996), composer, lyricist, playwright, who wrote the original version of Tick, Tick…Boom, as well as Rent, for which he won three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Andrew Garfield plays Jon, looking spookily like him, and he sure can sing. For this role, he's nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in this year's Academy Awards (TVNZ, 1pm, Monday, March 28).

Garfield demonstrates brilliantly the torment of a young creative who has difficulty with intimacy, with meeting deadlines and with believing in himself. But even when he's procrastinating, blundering, ignoring his girlfriend or just being his slightly annoying self, Jon is easy to relate to.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer, lyricist, actor, best known for Hamilton, is the director.

His vision and Garfield's acting have given us such a clear portrayal of Larson that the film should carry a hazard warning for anyone intending to engage at any level in musical theatre.

Watch out for the ticking sound that only you can hear as you start to write. Watch out for waves of panic that rise as words fail to materialise on the screen. And when at last you have something ready to rehearse, you will panic again over who's going to really get what you're trying to say.

The editing is a triumph, a seamless patchwork of beautifully linked small frame shots of Larson as a child and teenager, of full-screen scenes of him in New York working in a diner while struggling to pay the rent, using his experiences as material for stand-up, and in his unkempt flat as an endearing, flamboyant host with no money.

Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum are nominees for Best Achievement in Film Editing in this year's Oscars.

The introduction to the film tells us that Larson would no longer be here when Tick, Tick …Boom made it to Broadway. His girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) and his childhood friend Michael (Robin de Jesus) tried to tell him that he had what it took, so did Larson's role model Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford in a cameo role), but sadly, Jon never knew how successful he would be, nor how his work would revolutionise musical theatre.

Miranda, famous for using unstructured time in drama, has brought Larson's daydreaming and imagining into the foreground. The composition Jon so desperately needs to have ready for possible producers the next morning, after eight years as a question-mark in his notebook, comes to him in a flash of imagination from the tiles on the bottom of the public pool. His relief becomes ours.

Larson badly wanted to be like Sondheim with a hit musical before he was 30. He didn't quite make that self-imposed deadline and wasn't around long enough to enjoy the success that came to him at 36, but the pathos, hope and joy of his story make it a very good one indeed. Highly recommended.

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