Tick, Tick … Boom! Rated PG-13 for unmelodic cursing and a whiff of drug use. Instead, it’s up to a constellation of stage legends to bring the glitz - and boy, do they, in a centerpiece number with so many cameos that this small-scale film briefly becomes Broadway’s “Avengers.” His gangly limbs fill the frame, and the cinematographer Alice Brooks even follows his lead by eschewing pizazz for the humble grays of a walk-up apartment in winter. As a dancer, Garfield is a gleeful pogo-bopping creature in the homespun key of David Byrne. While he isn’t a lifelong singer like Vanessa Hudgens (in a supporting role as a cast member in Larson’s show-within-the-show), Garfield holds up his half of their duet with a capable voice that creaks just enough to sound sincere. Garfield at least gives Larson an endearing vulnerability. Boom manages, then, is a kind of miracle resurrection: It fashions a fresh, vivid work out of the life and art of a writer who was just finding his voice when it was cruelly silenced. Miranda’s devotion to his idol keeps him from expanding the musical’s myopic fretting into a universal story of sacrifice and resolve. The lyrics dwell on chirpy observations about his diner job, his writer’s block, his favorite swimming pool (another location in the film) and, of course, his prescient fear of mortality, which is the only reason Steven Levenson’s screen adaptation has dramatic heft. Even the songs cop that Larson was not yet the lyricist he would become. “Compromise or persevere?” Garfield’s striver croons, convinced that his impending 30th birthday - the time bomb in the title - will mark his decline from future superstar to “waiter with a hobby.” Foreshadowing carries the film.
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