Review: Lin-Manuel Miranda lets his theater-kid flag fly in 'tick, tick... BOOM!,' adapting the late Jonathan Larson's pre-'Rent' autobiography

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me so much sooner — maybe the first time I listened to my “Hamilton” CD or saw the movie adaptation of “In the Heights” — that Lin-Manuel Miranda is perhaps the most famous Broadway nerd in America, no matter how many hip-hop passages or Nuyorican rhythms he apples to his work.

Miranda gives his theater-kid side free rein in his movie directing debut, the quarter-life musical ’tick, tick… BOOM!” — the story that Miranda has said in interviews inspired him to keep pursuing a stage career when he was a struggling college student.

The movie begins with a big spoiler, when it shows itself to be the musical autobiography Jonathan Larson, written before his blockbuster musical “Rent” premiered on Broadway, then won a Pulitzer and several Tonys. Larson, though, wasn’t there to enjoy it; he died from an aortic aneurysm on the day of “Rent’s” first preview performance, a couple weeks’ shy of his 36th birthday.

Miranda doesn’t hide this information — not that he could, since it’s the stuff of Broadway legend — but uses it to add a layer of tragedy to the story, in which Larson (played by Andrew Garfield) describes to a theater audience the story of his life just before his 30th birthday.

It’s the start of 1990, and Larson is feeling the pressure of his birthday odometer clicking over from his exuberant 20s to his have-to-be-an-adult-now 30s. He has been writing a dystopian science-fiction musical for years, and is days away from having it performed at a workshop where important producers — and his idol, the composer Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford) — will see it on its feet for the first time, and his agent (Judith Light) won’t return his calls. Also, he’s missing a strong song for his female lead for Act II, and is running out of time to write it.

Larson’s also feeling the pressure from his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), a modern dancer who’s been offered a teaching job in the Berkshires and wants Larson to commit to leaving his rattrap Manhattan apartment to be with her. Meanwhile, his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús), has taken a corporate job with an ad agency — and Larson isn’t sure whether to stick to his art or sell out for the money. Also, Larson is watching many of his gay friends falling to the AIDS epidemic, and the fear being stoked by right-wing politicians, and feels like a real artist would be writing about it.

Miranda and screenwriter Steven Levenson (who also wrote the book and screenplay for “Dear Evan Hansen,” but don’t hold that against him) build up the artistic and personal tension in Larson’s life and work masterfully, usually grounding the musical numbers in reality, either with Garfield’s Larson singing and performing at the piano with his show-within-a-show’s cast — led by Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry, both brilliant — or with Garfield in soliloquy. 

The one number that’s an exception is a self-contained masterpiece of Broadway love, “Sunday,” a bravura life-in-a-day number depicting Larson’s work as a waiter at a New York diner during the Sunday brunch rush. What’s spectacular is the roster of diners, a Who’s Who of Broadway legends including Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Andre de Shields, Joel Grey, “Hamilton” leading ladies Renee Elise Goldsberry and Phillipa Sou, and three members of the original cast of “Rent”: Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Wilson Jermaine Heredia. Surely, a combination of Miranda’s reputation and Larson’s memory brought everyone out to be a part of it.

The supporting performances by de Jesús and Shipp are first-rate. Hudgens, who’s been singing since her “High School Musical” days and keeps improving, steals every scene she’s in — particularly in a motormouthed duet with Garfield, “Therapy,” that describes Larson’s arguments with Susan. 

Garfield, though this is his first time singing in a movie, throws himself whole-heartedly into the role, and the results are wonderful. Even when Larson is at his most selfish and navel-gazing, Garfield brings warmth and humanity to the moment.

It may be cruel to assign a movie’s faults to a dead man, but the weakness in “tick, tick… BOOM!” is Larson’s story and song score. In a story about an artist finding his voice, we’re constantly reminded of other characters, most of them LGBTQ and suffering from AIDS and government-sanctioned homophobia, whose voices are relegated to the background. Larson may get to those characters, as he did in “Rent” — and your mileage may vary on how well he succeeded in that much-lauded rewrite of “La Bohème” — but he’s too much in the foreground here.

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’tick, tick… BOOM!”

★★★

Opens Friday, November 12, in select theaters; streaming on Netflix starting Friday, November 19. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, some suggestive material and drug references. Running time: 115 minutes.