‘Tick, Tick... Boom!’ movie review: Andrew Garfield shines in an honest tribute to Jonathan Larson

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s meta-musical is stirringly brought to life by Garfield, who shines as the eccentric, funny, over-the-top musical theatre genius

The exhilaration of the stage, the hopeless pursuit for that moment of inspiration, thoughts that crowd the mind seconds before the cue, the ticking clock.. these are all-too-familiar situations for an artiste. Jonathan Larson was not alien to this. The renowned musical theatre writer best known for Rent — the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 musical — rode the highs and lows of the stage in 1990s New York, as the “boy genius” of a struggling theatre fraternity, where years worth of work got rejected in seconds and Broadway remained a distant dream.

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Thus “making art is expensive, but it’s worth every penny,” a refrain that we have heard time and again, yet which holds true through for artistes worldwide, forms the centre of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tearjerker of a tribute to Larson.