Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-
Music: A-

Point of clarification! Is it tick, tick… BOOM! or is it tick, tick… Boom! or is it Tick, Tick… Boom! or is it Tick, Tick… BOOM! People all over the place are capitalizing it in all different ways and it’s kind of driving me crazy. Well, the original Broadway program wrote it as tick, tick… BOOM! So does the movie poster, so, thank god we got that cleared up!

Point of presentation: tick, tick… BOOM! is semi-autobiographical, produced originally by Jonathan Larson as a solo work in 1990, later produced as a Broadway musical in 2001, after his game-changing RENT premiered in 1996. Spoiler alert, Larson died of an aortic dissection in 1996 at the age of 35, the day of RENT’s first Off Broadway preview performance. The film adaptation, which has been streaming on Netflix for two weeks now, makes his death clear from the very start, and considering it’s also a matter of historical record, it’s not exactly a crucial plot point. It is relevant, however—and I must confess I never knew anything about the Broadway show before the release of this film, which is also Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut. He proves to be well suited to it.

As usual, all I can personally speak to is how well it works as a movie, on its own terms. Audiences intimately familiar with Broadway productions may well have arguments otherwise, but I found tick, tick… BOOM! to be an invigorating watch, with infectiously catchy music and impressively structured lyrics. Perhaps the only thing that keeps it from reaching the same excellence as the 2005 film adaptation of RENT is simply that RENT redefined what theater could be. They can’t all manage the same such achievements, although as a movie experience, tick tick… BOOM! still comes close. Even though it’s increasingly awkward having to type out that objectively odd title.

And, to be fair, RENT changed what theater could be, but it had no such effect on film. It was simply translated well to film, granting it a far greater audience—the same thing being done for tick, tick… BOOM!, in this case largely because it’s streaming. The two stories do make great companion pieces, both of them far superior works to the first musical the semi-fictional Jonathan Larson creates, the play-within-a-play of sorts in tick, tick… BOOM! It sure has fun music, though, and I loved hearing every song he wrote for it, which, by extension, he also wrote for tick, tick… BOOM!

I kind of couldn’t get enough of the music in this movie, actually. From start to finish, every song hits its mark, none of them a miss. This movie wouldn’t be half as compelling without it, even though Andrew Garfield is an inspired casting choice for the lead. This may be the first time I truly saw Garfield lose himself in a part; watching him in this movie, I only ever saw Jonathan Larson, never Andrew Garfield. He has a vivacious spirit not seen in any of his other performances, an almost destructive optimism about him, the kind of attitude that struggling artists must have in order to find success, however long it takes. Furthermore, once you learn that Garfield never had any vocal training prior to this but took lessons for a year before production started, his vocal delivery is particularly impressive. This may because I have had no formal training myself, but to my ear he sounded every bit as good as any of the other professional singers in the cast around him.

The layered, meta element in tick, tick… BOOM! is tricky but well executed, by both Miranda’s direction and the screenplay by Steven Levenson, who does a much better job here than he did with the hot mess that was Dear Evan Hansen. (In his defense, that one was a hot mess before it was adapted from the stage.) In sharp contrast to many decades of the twentieth century, for maybe the past thirty years or so movie musicals have been very hit and miss with both commercial and artistic success. An unusual number of movie musicals are being released in 2021, and although still not all of them are great, the batting average has been surprisingly good. tick, tick… BOOM! is one of the good ones, the kind of movie that is easy to recommend as entertainment for eclectic audiences.

And this is in spite of the specificity of its subject matter, which, much like RENT, is set at the peak of the AIDS crisis—in this case, 1990, the year Jonathan Larson turned 30, something he does a bit of hand wringing about. Actually he does some irresistibly catchy singing about it. As it happened, Larson was straight—his strained relationship with girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) due to his obsession with his work is a key plot point—but his best friend Michael (Robin de Jesus) is gay, their existence in the world of theater and their many mutual friends thus being very connected to the death toll in that particular pandemic. When Jonathan’s agent (played by Judith Light, a delight as always) offers him some advice to move on to the next play and “write what you know,” we know that ultimately that advice will result in both tick, tick… BOOM! and RENT.

As a gay man with a straight best friend myself, I found something very comfortable and comforting about the depiction of such a relationship in film—and not just that it exists, but that it’s in a film set thirty years ago. I was fourteen years old in 1990, and in my world at the time, it seemed impossible that I could be gay and have any straight men even like me, let alone be close friends. It’s just a lovely thing to see that I was being proved wrong, even then, without realizing it. Even now we don’t see relationships like this in movies or TV very often, so it’s another of many things that make tick, tick… BOOM! a treat.

*Andrew Garfield wows in a delightful and moving movie musical.*

Overall: B+