Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda makes his feature directorial debut with tick, tick…BOOM!, an adaptation of the autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson, who revolutionized theater as the creator of Rent.
The film follows Jon (Academy Award nominee and Tony Award winner Andrew Garfield), a young theater composer who’s waiting tables at a New York City diner in 1990 while writing what he hopes will be the next great American musical.
Days before he’s due to showcase his work in a make-or-break performance, Jon is feeling the pressure from everywhere: from his girlfriend Susan, who dreams of an artistic life beyond New York City; from his friend Michael, who has moved on from his dream to a life of financial security; amidst an artistic community being ravaged by the AIDS epidemic.
With the clock ticking, Jon is at a crossroads and faces the question everyone must reckon with: What are we meant to do with the time we have?
tick, tick…BOOM! stars Academy Award nominee & Tony Award winner Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Tony Award nominee Robin de Jesús, Tony Award nominee Joshua Henry, MJ Rodriguez, Emmy Award winner Bradley Whitford, Tariq Trotter, with Emmy and Tony Award winner Judith Light, and Vanessa Hudgens.
The film is written by Tony Award winner Steven Levenson, and produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard for Imagine Entertainment, Julie Oh, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
tick, tick…BOOM! marks the feature directorial debut of Miranda, who grew up loving musicals, but didn’t see a clear path into the world until Jonathan Larson’s Rent came along. The full breadth of the musical’s humanity changed the course of Miranda’s life forever. Larson’s work not only sparked a dream for Miranda, but kept it alive in moments of doubt — one of the central themes of tick, tick…BOOM!
- The film is inspired by an autobiographical musical that composer and playwright Jonathan Larson wrote concurrently with Rent in the late 1980s to early ’90s. It was Larson’s response to his experiences writing his first musical, Superbia, which, despite having received positive feedback from Stephen Sondheim and others during workshops, ultimately went unproduced.
- The film follows a young composer named “Jon” (played in the film by Academy Award nominee Andrew Garfield) over the course of the eight frenzied days leading up to a crucial workshop performance of his musical, Superbia. As the deadline for the workshop looms, so does another: Jonathan’s 30th birthday — a milestone that weighs heavily on him. The pressure of these simultaneous ticking clocks acts as metronome for everything else he’s balancing: his day job as a waiter at the Moondance Diner, his relationship with his girlfriend, his friendships.
- The story captures a specific time in Jon’s life when he finds himself at a crossroads that occurs for every artist. Says the film’s director, Lin-Manuel Miranda:
“tick, tick…BOOM! is a corner of the world I know from every angle. I know what it’s like to be a struggling songwriter. I know what it is to be in your 20s writing that one musical, what it’s like to be in New York with a bunch of friends with artistic dreams and then watch them drop off one by one, to real life, while you’re still hanging on.
It’s a story of doubling down on your craft in the face of impossible odds, which is not unique to musical theater — it’s the struggle of any artist trying to make a living doing the thing they love.”
