“Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! », On Netflix: the joyful and moving tribute of Lin-Manuel Miranda to the author of« Rent »- Le Monde

NETFLIX – ON DEMAND – MOVIE

The output of Tick, Tick… Boom!, the first feature film directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, on Netflix, has something cruel about it. Already because, even if it means filming a musical, as much as it is projected on the big screen and put in sound with a little more resources than a television speaker. Then because the very existence of Miranda’s film unintentionally recalls how heavy the toll paid to Covid-19 by live shows and cinemas is. Seen from our sofa, Tick, Tick… Boom! almost looks like a memorial.

The film is also a kind of tomb, that of Jonathan Larson, gifted musician and full of ideas, great admirer of the composer. Stephen Sondheim and author of the very popular musical Rent, created in New York in 1996. Rent is the only successful project of Larson, who died suddenly, shortly before the first performance on Broadway of this work, at the age of 35, and was therefore only posthumously successful. The biopic that Lin-Manuel Miranda devotes to him is thus crossed from start to finish by the sense of urgency which animated Larson throughout his short career, as if he had intimately known that he would not live to old.

The title in the form of a warning is that of a completed but not produced work by Larson – semi-autobiographical, the “musical” Tick, Tick… Boom! was conceived as a “single on stage” with orchestra recounting the hard years of a vaguely fictional alter ego of Larson. The show carries with it the seeds of Rent, which transposes Bohemian, by Puccini, New York, at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Lin-Manuel Miranda, multi-cap artist very prominent since the immense success of his musical Hamilton (created in 1995 “off Broadway”) obviously knows all he owes to Larson. This debt makes Tick, Tick… Boom! a film in the form of a matryoshka, in which the autobiography responds to the biopic, where the works respond to each other and where euphoria disputes it with melodrama.

Decoupage art

The richness of the material worked here makes all the more surprising the sobriety of the means deployed by Miranda to revive man and his time. Refusing the temptation to appeal to the spectators’ nostalgia, the director only brings the New York of the early 1990s into existence by touches – Jonathan’s messy apartment, the ancient Mac on which he writes his songs, the fakes “Home movies” made on a camcorder … The same goes for the sung scenes, staged with a sobriety that allows to hear all the modernity of Larson’s texts and music, and sublimated by a nervous montage that comes and goes between the scene, life, eras, reality and fiction. Miranda had already brilliantly put the art of decoupage to the test in Fosse / Verdon, miniseries on the couple of eponymous artists of which he was the showrunneur.

Celebration of creative bubbling and artistic integrity, Tick, Tick… ​​Boom! required generous actors, capable of sparing the film the trap of navel-gazing. In Jonathan’s skin, Andrew Garfield does tons of it – wrinkled forehead, big wet eyes – but not enough to annoy. Especially since around him gravitate a few luminous characters: Robin de Jesus in the role of his best friend, who without regret abandoned his acting dreams to embrace a white collar career, Alexandra Shipp in the role of the little one friend, also tempted to hang up her dance shoes. To their maturity, Jonathan opposes a worried feverishness, the certainty that he cannot afford to give up. At the dawn of his 30th birthday, he therefore continues to serve burgers in a having dinner to pay the rent (rent) of his shabby studio filled with “Books and plays [qu’il] did not write “.

The person who will blow him the key to success will ultimately not be Stephen Sondheim, but his agent Rosa Stevens (Judith Light, in a cameo at the height of his talent). After attending a presentation by Superbia, a barred but promising project that will never see the light of day, she congratulates Jonathan but above all advises him to start working on his other project. “Because that’s what it is to be an author. “ And to add: “Write about what you know. ” So it will be Tick, Tick… ​​Boom!, then the revolution Rent, inclusive and vibrant production that brought the musical into the XXI^e century. He was right to believe it.