Tick Tick Boom Review: A Remarkable Netflix Musical Featuring Andrew Garfield’s Best Performance Yet

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesús, Vanessa Hudgens

Director: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Streaming Platform: Netflix (watch from here)

Filmyhype Ratings: 4/5 (four star)

Hollywood’s interest in musical cinema is set to resurface in the coming weeks, as ‘Cyrano’ and ‘West Side Story‘ will soon hit theaters, two titles that are sounding strongly for the next Oscars. Before we can see ‘Tick, Tick … BOOM!‘, the first feature film directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda that arrives on Netflix this Friday, November 19, after an ephemeral passage through a very small number of Spanish theaters. Adaptation of a theatrical musical by Jonathan Larson, also responsible for the much more acclaimed ‘Rent’, ‘tick, tick … BOOM!’ is a film that explores the creative process and the extent to which it can consume authors. He does it in a more than remarkable way and using the best performance that Andrew Garfield to date.

Tick Tick Boom Review: The Story

The film, set in 1990, tells the story of Jon (Andrew Garfield), a young theatrical composer who works as a waiter in a New York restaurant while writing what he hopes will become the next great American musical. In the days before presenting his work in a momentous function, Jon feels pressured on several fronts: by his girlfriend, Susan, who dreams of being an artist far from New York; by his friend Michael, who has abandoned his dreams in favor of financial stability; and for the AIDS epidemic that is wreaking havoc among the artistic community.

Jon, against time and at the crossroads of life, must face the same question as everyone else: what are we supposed to do with the time we have? In addition to Andrew Garfield himself, in the cast of Tick Tick…​​Boom! we found Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesús, Joshua Henry, MJ Rodriguez, Bradley Whitford and Tariq Trotter with Judith Light and Vanessa Hudgens. Also Tony Award winner Steven Levenson signs the screenplay for the film, which is produced by Oscar winners Brian Grazer and Ron Howard for Imagine Entertainment, Julie Oh and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Tick Tick Boom Review and Analysis

Ambition has the body of a city like New York. Yet in Larson’s world there is no room for skyscrapers, crowded shopping streets, squares like Times Square or gardens like those of Central Park. No recognizable element of the city that never sleeps, but glimpses of real-life environments, so unique and yet so similar to those of a thousand other cities, made of murals and crowded clubs on Sunday mornings. The environment captured by Miranda’s camera is an anonymous, ordinary world, as apparently anonymous and ordinary Larson seems. Closed in his bubble of ambitious creativity, the boy moves through the streets of the Big Apple ignored, misunderstood, unseen. A shadow that inside hides a light blocked in the bud, in constant power, ready to explode like a bomb, between constant ticks and inevitable implosions. And then it is precisely in that ordinariness that beauty, a crumb of talent and unusual wonder must be sought.

Larson knows that the strength of a brilliant mind flows silently in him, the fire of art fueled by the spectacle of life. A fusion that Miranda’s camera itself constantly reminds us, transforming every single moment of everyday life into a musical interlude. Yet the dynamism that burns and moves the sky and the other stars in Miranda’s universe is missing. What is missing is that beat of wings and heart beats that have dressed a theatrical show like Hamilton with the clothes of a film, where the scene changes, the choreographic ensembles live on a dynamism that recalls a cinematographic montage capable of taking the spectator by the hand and living one and a thousand lives, experiences, emotions, as many as they live and breathe on stage. Attentive to building the prestigious cinematic reflection of Larson’s work, Miranda focuses on technical perfection, forgetting the most important aspect of a film like Tick, Tick… BOOM: the heart.

The director takes the lead in directing with confidence and extreme professionalism, placing the characters in the center of the screen making them real and no longer the moving shadows of a past lent to art. An infusion of life accomplished without cabalistic or magical rites, but thanks to the dynamic force of a fluid camera and a harmonious editing rhythm that stays at the pace of the camera, emphasizing and underlining the emotional and semantic significance of each single movement. Yet the general sense that transpires is that of a sterile style, especially when compared with that of the previous Hamilton a style more suited to a concert film than to an immersive storytelling. Although stuck in the grips of a direction that would both mean and (s) move in a dynamism that is not entirely saturated, the emotions still manage to shine through.

Thanks above all to the visual composition of an iridescent photograph that chromatically adapts to every mood experienced in the frame of every moment. It is a company of dancers ready to change clothes in the arrival of each act, the one curated by the operator Alice Brook. A gallery of paintings of different formats and aspect-ratios that are colored with shades and shades now light, warm, now cold and shady, responding to the call of emotions. This study makes each song a sort of music video clip, a son born within the MTV generation and launched towards that audiovisual collage that tries to make Tick, tick … BOOM the most perfect transposition of the intentions of its original author and his worthy witness, Miranda.

The Last Words

‘Tick, Tick… BOOM!‘ It is an honest and emotional love letter to Larson that amazes and touches the heart. At the same time, the film stands as a celebration of this branch of theatrical art and in addition, it is a beautiful tribute to the extremely hard and sacrificial creative process always so undervalued and misunderstood above all by the ruling leaders of the world. Miranda dominates with her images a narrative that achieves an effective balance between telling and showing, not easy considering that we are facing the musical adaptation of a musical that talks about the creation of a musical. Of course, a puzzle that the now filmmaker has resolved with a very surprising ability to be his first feature film. Of course, this is an ideal movie for Broadway lovers, but also to fall in love with the genre again. If, on the other hand, you are a spectator who is too reluctant to his ways, this may be a good opportunity to connect with him.