But this leaves him no time either for Michael, who despite his financial success is having his own problems, or for his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who wants to move out of the city. Jonathan’s driving passion is to complete a futuristic musical called “Superbia” in time for a public workshop, which he imagines will be his ticket to immediate success and the end of his troubles at the ripe age of almost 30. Lest this make “Tick, Tick … Boom!” sound somber or reverential, not to worry: It is instead a brisk, assured, bustling entertainment. Framed by a performance of the songs at an Off-Broadway theater that Larson did with a band in the early ’90s, the film’s story unfolds mainly in the cluttered walk-up apartment Jonathan shares with Michael (Robin de Jesús), a childhood friend who is abandoning the theater to work in advertising-and decamping to enviably posh digs uptown-and in the greasy-spoon diner where Jonathan works to barely make ends meet. Lest this make “Tick, Tick … Boom!” sound somber or reverential, not to worry: It is instead a brisk, assured, bustling entertainment that manages to achieve the soaring transcendence that musicals can deliver without abandoning the intimate, even grubby realism of a chamber drama. The composer famously died in 1996, at the age of 35, on the eve of the Off-Broadway premiere of “Rent.” So “Tick, Tick … Boom!” isn’t just an adaptation of an early, autobiographical work by Larson it is also a soul-deep tribute by the composer of “In the Heights” and “Hamilton” to an artist who inspired him at a formative age. This is all the more impressive a feat because it’s an act of channeling by the filmmakers, director Lin-Manuel Miranda and screenwriter Steven Levenson, and actor Andrew Garfield, who plays Larson. “Tick, Tick … Boom!” is a soul-deep tribute by Lin-Manuel Miranda to an artist who inspired him at a formative age. It is also a distinguished entry in a more rarefied catalogue: Like Fellini’s “8 ½” or Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” “Tick, Tick … Boom!” is a brilliant exercise in self-reflexive autofiction, a portrait of the artist that seems to draw itself. “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” the stunning, irrepressible new film based on a musical by “Rent” composer Jonathan Larson (now showing in limited theaters and on Netflix), is a mix of all three categories.
Works of art about artists tend to fall into a few well-established categories: biopics about brilliant, troubled painters barely concealed roman à clefs about authors’ lives and behind-the-scenes show business tales.
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