There’s a difference between a central character and a black hole. tick, tick … BOOM! suffers from the latter.
Andrew Garfield stars as Jonathan Larson, the real-life composer, lyricist, and playwright who died suddenly at 35, on the eve of the debut of what would become his Broadway sensation, Rent. tick, tick … BOOM! portrays Larson a few years earlier, in the late 1980s, while he’s scrambling to prepare a workshop for his first musical idea, an ill-fated futuristic rock saga. (tick, tick itself is an adaptation of the one-man musical monologue Larson produced between that workshop and Rent.)
Garfield is fine, if a bit one-note in his show-must-go-on energy. The real issue is that the film is maniacally focused on Larson as the uber-struggling artist in a way that eventually feels monstrous, devouring any other character or concern that happens to cross its path.
Even when the movie acknowledges the selfishness of the Larson figure—the passive-aggressive way he avoids discussing his future with his dancer girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), even in the face of her pressing job offer; his prioritizing of his workshop over caring for an HIV-positive friend (Ben Ross)—tick, tick … BOOM! still contorts these narrative threads so that they ultimately serve Larson’s narrative. Even a ballad Larson performs after learning that another friend (Robin de Jesus) has tested positive feels tacked on, a sad nod to the AIDS epidemic before getting back to the business at hand.
The business at hand is always, repetitively, detailing what it’s like to be a talented, unproduced, financially strapped musical-theater composer. And so tick, tick … BOOM! has numbers about how annoying it is to work as a server during Sunday brunch or how one can find inspiration from a revitalizing swim at the local pool. In the movie’s nadir, “Johnny Can’t Decide,” Garfield’s Larson sings about his artistic aspirations in the third person. (The conceit at least allows him to mention two of his friends and their dreams, but those lyrics register as little pats on the head.)
All of this tracks for a project—much like the film version of Rent—that can’t conceive of anything of interest beyond the striving of an artist. Good art can be made of such material, but it isn’t easy. What’s usually needed is either an element of raw, honest introspection (see Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation or Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II) or onscreen talent so immense that we would be enthralled if the performers were singing about their taxes (see Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in the showbiz-centric Summer Stock).
Which brings us to how tick, tick … BOOM! works as a musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda makes his feature directorial debut here, bringing an obvious affinity for Larson’s story and an enthusiastic camera. Both are on display in the intimate, a capella “Boho Days”—performed at a party in Larson’s cramped apartment—which makes clever use of space and movement and functions, early on, as a knowing number about what it’s like to dream big from a small perch in New York City. But the other numbers—almost all of which tread the same thematic ground—are fairly anonymous, an anodyne combination of the lesser music videos of the era and contemporary television ads for Target.
There is a climatic point in tick, tick … BOOM! where Garfield’s Larson is told the old adage, “Write what you know.” There’s truth to that, but sometimes what you know can only take you so far. Clearly it took the real-life Larson far enough—Rent won him, posthumously, a Pulitzer Prize—but doubling, even tripling down on the struggling-artist experience here feels like a dead end, a void from which nothing new can escape.
(12/2/2021)
