Lin-Manuel Miranda’s turning his directorial talents from Broadway to feature filmmaking for the first time with his adaptation of Tick, Tick …BOOM!, Jonathan Larson’s very meta, autobiographical musical about the long process of writing RENT. Andrew Garfield stars as Larson, who waited tables in New York City while spending years laboring on the musical that would make him a theater icon. But while grappling with the AIDS epidemic that is ravaging the arts community and the outside pressures of living up to his own hopes and expectations, Larson falls into the existential crisis that plagues us all: What are we doing with our one wild, precious life?
Miranda, clearly a sort of spiritual heir to Larson, is a good fit for the material, but it remains to be seen if his theatrical instincts translate to feature filmmaking. We’ll know when the movie drops in theaters on November 12 before heading to Netflix the very next week on the 19th.
