“tick, tick…Boom!” begins as he is about to turn 30 and is still struggling with a dystopian, futuristic sci-fi musical he has been working on for eight years. Larson ( Andrew Garfield) was not so quick to understand that his environment could be the source for his work. A couple of years later, while he was still in college, Miranda began creating the Tony Award-winning “In the Heights,” set in the neighborhood where he grew up.

They could be stories of the kind of people Miranda saw every day. Miranda saw “Rent” on his 17 th birthday and it was a transformational experience, showing him for the first time that musical theater did not need to be about cowboys, Austrians escaping the Nazis, or the merry murderesses of 1920s Chicago. This film is explicitly theatrical, going back and forth between Larson’s story and his one-man show telling the story. Miranda, who starred as Larson in a theatrical performance of this play, directs the film with a deep understanding of the passion, struggle, and ebullience of an artist committed to an art form that requires a lot of money and a lot of other people to be brought to life. (Sondheim was passing along the help he received from another Broadway titan, Oscar Hammerstein.) And “tick, tick…Boom!” is also a thanks to Larson from director Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of “ Hamilton,' who might be seen as his successor. Larson’s thanks include the foremost musical theater artist of the 20 th century, Stephen Sondheim, an early mentor, played in this film by Bradley Whitford.

It is also a tribute, and an expression of gratitude, for the almost baton-like passage of support from those who Larson describes as a vanishing species, the creators of musical theater.

Musicals by jonathan larson