The Media Tourist

Andrew Garfield soars in director Lin-Manuel Miranda’s paean to musical theater dreams

Tick…Tick…BOOM!
Starring Andrew Garfield
Directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Rated PG-13

In select theaters now, available on Netflix Nov. 19

Musical-theater geeks will flip over this immersive paean to one of Broadway’s fallen heroes.

Jonathan Larson, who composed the groundbreaking rock musical Rent—which ran on Broadway for 12 years—died suddenly, of a heart malady, on the very night of his production’s premiere performance in 1996. Only 35 at the time of this cosmic irony, he was awarded three posthumous Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his La Bohemè-ish tale of impoverished young artists struggling, under the grim specter of the epidemic of AIDS, to live, love and lean on each other in the Big Apple.

But this isn’t that story. Rather, it’s the story of Larson and his pre-Rent challenges in completing, and staging, a futuristic 1990 oddity called Superbia, loosely inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. 

Andrew Garfield plays Larson, and the film marks the directorial debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who certainly knows a thing about Broadway, Tonys, Grammys and other trophies as the writer (and star) of his own Broadway sensation, Hamilton. Earlier this year, another of Miranda’ works, In the Heights, got the Hollywood treatment.

Garfield may be best known to the general moviegoing public for his two movie turns as The Amazing Spider-Man, but he’s turned in several impressive other “grown-up” performances—in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, in The Social Network, as conscientious-objector WWII hero Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge, and just recently, as disgraced telemarking evangelist Jim Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

And he soars to new heights of his own here, for a tricky role that required him to expand his skillset to learn to sing and play the piano. He portrays Larson as a zealous, youthful idealist, anxious to establish a toehold on Broadway, to create a buzz that will be his big break. The tick-ticking he hears in his head is the sound of his rapidly vanishing 20s, and his approaching self-imposed deadline: his upcoming 30^th birthday.

Larson is a bit self-obsessed and totally driven, as he nourishes his dreams while slinging sandwiches in a busy diner. But he has a big heart for his fellow “bohemian” friends, especially his childhood pal, Michael (a terrific Robin de Jesús), who gave up his own theatrical dreams for the steady income of a Madison Avenue job. And he also loves his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Ruth Shipp, who starred in the title role in the 2014 Lifetime movie Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B), an interpretive dancer whose thoughts for a more practical future might pose a bit of a problem for their relationship.

High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens (who also starred on Broadway in Gigi and had roles in the TV musical presentations of Grease: Live and Rent: Live) and Joshua Henry—who played Aaron Burr in Hamilton—provide impressive, real-chops backupas singing characters in Larson’s show.

As he struggles with a massive, monstrous case of writer’s block, trying to find the right song to cap his musical as the days trickle down to its public-workshop debut, Larson watches his friends succumb to HIV and AIDs, putting some heavy perspective on his own deadlines and goals.  

Director Manuel can certainly identify with a young composer striving to become established, because he used to be one. He knows all about the world of Jonathan Larson, because it was once his world, too. And he certainly knows how to make a musical, deftly, innovatively unfolding Larson’s story—and his existential predicament—in a mixed format of musical performances, flashy movie-musical set pieces, straightforward dramatic scenes and “fantasy” sequences that blur the lines. When Larson goes to clear his head with a swim, he marvels as markers on the bottom seem to turn into musical staffs and notes; in the rousing number “No More,” Larson and Michael contrast the young ad executive’s gleaming new valet-tended apartment high-rise with the cramped, squalid, six-floor walkup where the two friends used to be roommates—and were Larson still lives.  

Fans of musicals will delight in Easter-egg cameos from a slate of stage-heeled celebs—a flock of cameo casting that was helped, no doubt, by Miranda’s superstar cachet in the theatrical community. Bradley Whitford is spot-on as theater icon Stephen Sondheim, who gives Larson some valuable advice, and Judith Light (who made her debut on Broadway before landing a starring role in 1977 on TV’s One Life to Live) plays Larson’s agent, Rosa, who tells him that the musical he should be working on is always “the next one.”

The next one, for Larson, was his autobiographical one-man-show, Tick…Tick…Boom!, which was ultimately staged posthumously as a multi-part rock musical. And then came Rent, the production that would have brought him the success, and the achievement, he so ardently sought as a younger man on the dreaded cusp of closing out his third decade.

But this impassioned, enthusiastically eclectic portrait reminds us of the boundless dream of a gifted creator taken too soon, and takes viewers into a teeming, bustling, hustling substrata world of musical theater that’s not quite Broadway…not just yet—as it suggest to all of us, whatever we do, that “the next one” could be, and might just be, the big one.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a cruel cowboy in ‘The Power of the Dog’

The Power of the Dog
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst and Kodi Smit-McPhee
Directed by Jane Campion
In theaters Friday, Nov. 19; on Netflix Wednesday, Dec. 1

The West isn’t all that wild in this taut, terrifically tense tale set in Montana in 1925; there’s electricity and automobiles. But it’s a wild ride alongside Benedict Cumberbatch—who’s played a spectrum of characters, across a wide swath of genres, from sci-fi to period dramas—as he saddles up to play a cowboy.

But not just any cowboy—he’s one particularly tough, unlikable hombre.

Cumberbatch stars as Phil Burbank, a cattle rancher who lives on the sprawling property he and his brother, George (Jesse Plemons), took over from their parents. The two siblings couldn’t be more different. George is a soft-spoken gentleman who dresses in dandy suits; Phil, who refuses to even bathe indoors, is as rough and rugged as a pair of old rawhide chaps. He castrates cattle barehanded with two brisk whisks of his knife, struts and stomps in his boots and spurs, and revels in the musk and mire of clearly being the ranch’s alpha male.

“I stink, and I like it,” he snarls, and we know it in more ways than one.

When George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst, Plemons’ real-lifewife), a widow who operates a nearly boarding house, and moves her into the mansion-like ranch manor, it triggers something in Phil—a toxic seethe of jealousy, resentment and suppressed anger. Phil cruelly taunts Rose and her sensitive son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a lanky pup of a lad who makes paper flowers, plays with a hula hoop and wears white canvas shoes instead of boots. Phil thinks Pete is a sissy, an effeminate “half-cooked” nancy, almost subhuman. And he torments the emotionally fragile Rose—and stokes her growing sense of dislocation, menace and unease—by whistling a tune that he knows she can no longer remember how to play on the piano.

Phil knows how to inflict hurt, knows how to wound. His poisonous personality burns like the bright ends of his hand-rolled cigarettes when he puffs, falling onto his shirt like combustion from a fire from deep within him. His mockery of Pete gets supportive guffaws from his ranch hands, he takes out his rage on his horse, and he drives Rose to drink and Pete to tears.

Filming in her native New Zealand, director Jane Campion, who won a pair of Oscars for writing and directing her 1993 romantic drama The Piano, creates a masterful atmosphere of creeping dread for where this is all headed. She captures the rich details of life on the ranch—and a crucial subtext of the bonding between these cowboys, whose work with other men isolates them from much of the rest of the world—against spectacular vistas of picture-postcard perfection, with massive mountains, oceans of grass, and a herd of hundreds of cattle, flowing across the dusty plain like a bovine river.

High up on a mountainside, Phil sees something, when the sun is at a certain angle, casting shadows on the terrain, making a specific outline, a design in the interplay of light and dark. But he’s also looking up there and into his past, and the genesis of his idolization and fetishization of a long-gone horseman, Bronco Henry, who taught him how to work cattle.

Cumberbatch, who was Oscar-nominated for his starring role in The Imitation Game (2014), shows all the signs of another nomination here, creating a character that practically sears the screen with his vicious unkindness—and a complexity that hints at fragility, a degree of refinement, intelligence, and some other things…despite his grimy fingernails, coarse personality and stiff backbone. With a towering performance that recalls the intensity of Daniel-Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, Cumberbatch’s Phil is a portrait of bullying, hyper-masculine toxicity that makes a target of anything, and anyone, that he perceives to be weak.

After Pete makes a discovery that sheds new light on Phil, it begins to reshape their relationship—but it will it lead to something better, or something even more malevolent?

The movie (and the 1967 novel on which it’s based) takes its title from a Bible verse in the book of Psalms, a bitter poem attributed David, the young shepherd who slew the giant Goliath and later became King of Israel. It’s reference to deliverance from his foes and “the power of the dog,” an animal seen in ancient times as a lowly, undomesticated pack scavenger that attacked the vulnerable.

Phil has both the bark and the bite. He’s top dog among his group of ranch-hand cowboys in this twisty, tough-as-nails frontier tale, in which the age-old battle between good and evil plays out on an intense psychological tableau, one straddling the border between clean, convenient modernity and the rugged, raw, ragged past.

And when it bares its teeth and clamps down, hard, and likely not how you’d expect, this Dog takes you by surprise, and it really leaves a mark.