Tick, Tick...Boom! - Cheap Thoughts

There’s always this fine line when it comes to telling the story of a struggling artist. It’s an easy lifestyle to romanticise and glorify, creating this unhealthy ideal that for someone to succeed as an artist they have to be poor, depressed or socially exiled. Tick Tick…Boom loves to play on that line like it’s the string to a violin and yet never trips over to the other side thanks to some delicate decisions within the script. It’s safe to say a decent amount of credit to this can be given to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s own personal struggles in building his career as a theatre icon. Mind you, that’s is a blatant guess, having done no research into Miranda’s own history, it could entirely be that his career was an easy and fluid transition, in which case even further kudos can be given to him accurately being able to represent the struggle of trying to create art while trying to survive in an overwhelming money ridden corporate world. There’s a particular scene at Larson’s daytime job working the brunch rush at a diner that hits very close to home for anyone who’s worked in customer service.

For a directorial debut while Miranda may have played it safe with the story and choosing a tale he is no doubt very familiar with, he doesn’t play it safe with his camera. TTB is a musical adaptation of the life of Jonathan Larson (Played by Andrew Garfield) and Miranda clearly has enough experience in front of the camera to understand the power it can hold in elevating a film versus a staged production where his origins lie. There is such an energy and purpose to his shots, giving them life and emotion, while there is no big show-stopper production with flashy effects and bombastic dance numbers, each sequence is filmed appropriately to convey the emotions present in the song.

Above that he knows to give the majority focus to Garfield, the stand-out performance within the film. He provides such charisma and purposeful decisions behind every movement and facial expression. He is a character with such an explosive energy it leaks out constantly even in the humblest of moments and so when the film allows for him to fully express himself through the musical numbers and dramatic moments, he alleviates himself by giving everything to it. There is already much talk about a potential Oscar nomination for this performance which he certainly deserves and would definitely be preferred over self-indulgent dramatic performances full of nihilism and rage that usually takes hold of the Oscar voters. If there is one emotion that charges Garfield’s performance, it’s love.

There was another paragraph meant to discuss Larson’s real-life career and legacy, specifically that of his most famous work Rent but it felt mostly tangential and critical of external work. It didn’t feel right to harp on about it, but it also didn’t feel right to ignore it entirely as this whole film is a build up to his big break with Rent as his magnum opus and yet it feels disingenuous considering the reputation of Rent has only lessened over the years. It’s understandable the film wouldn’t address this, arguably it never needed to, especially when that’s not in Miranda’s style to analyse the complications of a person and instead focus on the legacy they left as a whole. Yes this is another Lin-Manuel Miranda piece about legacy what were you expecting?

-Danny