
Garfield’s Larson is clearly severely depressed, but presents to the world with a manic smile and enthusiasm, as if he’s always on. The centerpiece of this movie, of course, is star Andrew Garfield, who really does an incredible job bringing Jonathan Larson back to life.
#Ticktick boom movie
This change makes sense in order to present the movie as a biopic, but it was nonetheless disappointing to see some of his friend’s songs cut. The downside to this adaptation is that it shifts the focus back nearly 100% to Jonathan’s side of the story, allowing very little time to be spent on the other people in his life. The nature in which the onstage songs comment on the “real” character scenes almost felt like an homage to the storytelling in the film version of Cabaret, one of nearly a thousand references and Easter Eggs to musical theater packed into this dense, dense movie.
This performance is intercut with more straightforward dialogue scenes of his life and interactions with his friends, creating a pretty clear picture of how messy his life was in the early ’90s. The film is told through the wraparound narration of Larson’s rock monologue, in which he directly tells his story to the audience through song. Especially when considering that this is Miranda’s first film as a director, it’s kind of stunning how well it comes together. So this movie did not need to do much to win me over, and yet, it still managed to surpass my expectations. I’m a huge fan of musicals, already loved the stage versions of both of Larson’s works, and couldn’t be a bigger fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s if I tried. I must confess my bias, as I am essentially the exact target audience for this movie. A sort of biopic about Larson’s life just before he crafted his opus, the Tick, Tick… Boom! Movie incorporates elements of both of its stage predecessors into one cohesive whole. Boom!” was revised into a successful three-person show which, in turn, has now inspired this latest iteration of the piece- a feature film of the same name directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The tragic irony of Larson’s story, however, is that he never got to see that success, as he died suddenly the morning of the show’s premiere.ĠPosthumously, his one-man “ Tick, Tick. Of course, five years later he would do just that, creating the Pulitzer Prize-winning phenomenon Rent. The following year, he chronicled his struggles into an experimental rock monologue titled “ Tick, Tick…Boom!”, in which he expressed his longing to shake up the theater world and produce the next great musical before it’s too late.

Having spent years crafting his first full-length musical, he found himself hitting a creative wall, unable to proceed. In the winter of 1990, struggling composer Jonathan Larson suffered an existential crisis on the eve of his 30th birthday. Typically biographical dramas focus on the successes of their subjects. The new Netflix movie Tick, Tick… Boom! is a very unusual biopic.
