Lin-Manuel Miranda (2021)
It takes a while to get the hang of the narrative. Tick, Tick … Boom!, the first cinema feature directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda (from a screenplay by Steven Levenson), is an adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s work of the same name, interlaced with a biography of Larson. That makes the two things sound distinct, which they’re not. Larson was born in 1960 in New York City, and always lived there. His ‘rock monologue’ Tick, Tick … Boom!, set in NYC in 1990, tells the story of an aspiring show composer called Jon, who, as he turns thirty, is suffering a crisis of confidence about the career in musical theatre that he craves. In other words, it’s an autobiographical piece (which, after its creator’s death in 1996, David Auburn reconfigured as a three-character stage musical). It also includes a musical-within-a-musical – Jon’s passion project ‘Superbia’, which is being developed in workshop. The film’s hyperactive style and splintered structure aim to reflect Larson’s personality – his restless creativity and emotional instability. Miranda wants us to be discombobulated and, thereby, partake of that personality. He succeeds only up to a point.
Tick, Tick … Boom! takes its title from the sensations that, according to Larson, he feels persistently inside his head. The first two words chime also with Jonathan’s anxious awareness of time passing – expressed in the opening number, ‘30/90’. (30 is the age he’s about to become, 90 the year of the century in which this birthday occurs.) In retrospect, the third word can seem to predict the premature and sudden end of Larson’s life, a few days before his thirty-sixth birthday, from an (undiagnosed) aortic dissection. Not only is there another musical within Tick, Tick … Boom!; there’s also one that stands above and beyond Miranda’s film – Rent, the work for which Jonathan Larson is chiefly remembered. He died in the early hours of January 25th 1996; that evening, Rent had its first Off-Broadway preview performance. The show opened on Broadway three months later, and won for Larson posthumously the Tony awards for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score. Rent played continuously at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre until September 2008.
The coincidence of Larson’s death and Rent‘s opening is the stuff of the-show-must-go-on fictional melodrama. Lin-Manuel Miranda doesn’t make a big sentimental deal of this in his film but has made clear in interviews what Rent means to him personally: seeing it for the first time fired his own theatrical ambitions. It will mean plenty to many of Miranda’s audience, too – making it hard, perhaps, to separate feelings about Tick, Tick … Boom! from feelings about Rent or, at least, guaranteeing the film emotional texture. It’s not quite the same for those (like me) for whom Rent connotes a great Pet Shop Boys song rather than Larson’s La bohème-inspired musical about young artists living and working in Greenwich Village under the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Just knowing what eventually happened to Larson is enough, of course, to give Miranda’s film a poignant edge. It also affects how you react to the driven, self-centred Jonathan (Andrew Garfield): the tragic brevity of his life makes you less intolerant of how he treats others, especially his dancer girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) and Michael (Robin de Jesús), a gay friend who has quit acting for advertising. (Both are exasperated by the protagonist but, in different ways, loyal to him.) More than this is needed, though, to sustain strong feelings of involvement with Jonathan and the film comes up short – I think for three reasons.
As Lin-Manuel Miranda was inspired by Jonathan Larson, so Larson was inspired by Stephen Sondheim, who also reviewed his work on request and wrote him several letters of recommendation. Although Bradley Whitford is Sondheim on the screen in Tick, Tick … Boom!, the latter’s own voice is heard on a voicemail that Jonathan receives in the film (which we happened to see just five days before Sondheim died). I don’t know much of Sondheim’s work but I found some of Larson’s numbers reminding me of his mentor’s in that lyrical and rhythmical ingenuity tends to upstage melody. This has an emotionally distancing effect, as does Miranda’s direction. It’s competent enough but keeping those narrative plates spinning gives Tick, Tick … Boom! a sealed-off, artificial quality and the lightly mocking comedy bits are heavy-handed – as when Jonathan’s agent (Judith Light), on the phone to him, pretends she’s knee-deep in competing calls with more established show business names. A sequence in which Sondheim and Walter Bloom (Richard Kind), the head of the musical theatre workshop, jointly appraise Jonathan’s work, is pretty dire. (Bloom is disparaging but Sondheim keeps taking a more positive view and Bloom, cravenly disinclined to disagree with the great man, has to keep changing his tune.)
I was interested to see what Jonathan Larson actually looked like: according to present-day biopic convention, he appears in film clips during the closing credits to Tick, Tick … Boom! This was a case where seeing the real thing didn’t obliterate the version I’d been watching for the previous two hours so much as confirm a growing suspicion that Andrew Garfield, engaging and admirably committed as he is, isn’t quite right in the lead role. He hadn’t sung or played piano on screen before, worked for a year on learning to do both, and does them well yet nearly everything in his performance feels worked out in advance. He’s eager, animated and agreeably eccentric. He’s not the haywire force of nature that Jonathan Larson is alleged to have been – and, with his big, irregular features, looks to have been, as Garfield never does.
21 November 2021
