#Ticktick review movie

The musical performances move the plot forward and are cleanly cut together with scenes that provide context to Jon’s wavering state, both physically and emotionally. Miranda uses Jon’s introduction of the narrative to add layers: Jon is performing for this audience, not just speaking, but singing at a piano alongside an accompanying band and vocalists.

Jon continues to narrate, beginning to tell his story to an unseen audience. Combined with a wisely adapted screenplay by Steven Levenson and Andrew Garfield’s grounded, heartfelt performance, Miranda pays tribute to Broadway and captures the essence of Larson’s anxieties and ambitions. Jonathan Larson would eventually receive acclaim for his work posthumously, as he sadly passed away of an aortic dissection the night before “Rent” would premiere Off-Broadway. In it, Larson, the playwright behind “Rent,” tells the story of the events surrounding an earlier work of his. “Tick, tick … BOOM!” is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical monologue.

Jon has a workshop for his musical, “Superbia,” soon, and should it not succeed, he worries he will have nothing to show for himself at the end of three decades. That flame gets closer and the ticking picks up throughout the film as Jon’s 30th birthday approaches. The film “tick, tick … BOOM!” opens with Jon, a struggling writer, as he addresses an audience both on and off-screen: “The fuse has been lit, the clock counts down the seconds as the flame gets closer and closer and closer…”

#Ticktick review movie

An image from the 2021 Netflix movie “tick, tick BOOM.”