Andrew Garfield plays Rent composer Jonathan Larson in Miranda’s sugar rush of showbiz highs and lows
Lin-Manuel Miranda gives us an unashamed sugar rush of showbiz rapture and showbiz solemnity in this heartfelt tribute to Broadway talent Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield. Larson was the composer who created the smash-hit 90s show Rent but died at 35 of an aortic failure, just before opening night, an almost unbearable metaphor for the backstage heartbreak of musical theatre. (Miranda himself has a cameo as a short-order cook in the diner where Larson had to work as a waiter in his early years.)
This movie has been adapted by screenwriter Steven Levenson from tick, tick … BOOM!, Larson’s autobiographical piece that came just before Rent, and told the story of his first major musical project: a wildly ambitious futurist fantasy called Superbia that almost no one seemed to get. The film is about an irony that was to afflict Larson in ways he couldn’t have conceived: the ordeal of the quarter-life crisis, the first glimmers of approaching mortality and the realisation that options are closing down, something that particularly afflicts those approaching their 30s in the creative arts who don’t seem to be making it. When do you cut your losses and bail out for a straight, boring
Job in, say, advertising? The world is ticking like a time
bomb and soon your career will blow up, and not in a good way.