tick, tick... BOOM! · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Moondance Diner, brunch rush. Jonathan Larson is taking orders, and the orders start to rhyme.

The ensemble locks into a contrapuntal build, customers stacking their demands into harmony, and the room settles into a held tableau. It is an open pastiche of "Sunday," the finale of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, where a crowd arranges itself into a painting and stops. Watch what it does to Larson. He is not leading this number. He is working a shift, and the shift assembles itself into a number around him.

Deleuze had a name for that reversal. Usually a film character sees a situation and moves to change it; the movement belongs to the person. The musical breaks that arrangement. The dancer stops generating the movement and gets taken up by it, until the world is doing the moving and the body is being carried. Movement of world, he called it, and he was watching Astaire and Kelly when he named it. What earns the concept here is that Larson is no dancer. He is a waiter with a notebook and a deadline. The number does not lift him out of the day job. The day job supplies the choreography.

Which is also why the diner reads as what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called a gest: a posture that exposes the social relation holding it. The arm carrying four plates and the arm keeping time are the same arm. Miranda stages the mundane room as the set, and the economics of being twenty-nine and unproduced become visible as movement instead of complaint.

Now the film's real machine. Alice Brooks photographs in two registers: the concert frame in pooled, hard-edged theatrical light, the 1990 scenes warm and naturalistic in a nostalgic downtown Manhattan. Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum then spend the entire film crossing between them. A lyric sung onstage bleeds into the scene it describes. A spoken transition on the stage opens a door into the past. Ask which of the two images is the memory and the question stops working. Deleuze called this a crystal-image: an actual thing and its virtual double locked so tightly you cannot say which one is the original. His usual example is a mirror. Here the mirror is a song.

Some crystals, he said, are caught in the act of forming, growing outward from a seed — a bit of theater planted inside the film out of which everything else precipitates. Fellini was his case, and 8½ is exactly where this film's family line starts: the blocked artist, the interior weather of memory and fantasy cut together as though it were plot. Fosse musicalized that in All That Jazz, intercutting a creator's life against its own staged performance and against an oncoming death, and it is the architecture Miranda inherits nearly intact. Here the seed is literal: a man, a band, a microphone, an audience. Cabaret supplied the other half of the rule, keeping numbers inside plausible venues, and that matters more than it sounds, because ambiguity has to start somewhere solid. Club, stage, rehearsal room, diner. A song can only dissolve into memory if it began in a room with a floor.

There is a flaw in this crystal, and the film knows it. Deleuze took that idea from Renoir: a crack in the closed world through which something gets out. Everyone watching arrives already knowing Larson will not live to see Rent. So the film holds three presents that refuse to resolve into one another: 1990, the stage narrating 1990, and our own retrospect. These are not flashbacks. A flashback is a past that has been safely filed. These are peaks of present, simultaneous and non-negotiable, which is why the title's countdown produces so little suspense and so much dread. The tick measures no action. It just keeps time. What escapes through the crack is the work, not the man.

Around all of this, quietly, people are disappearing. Michael, Larson's closest friend, has traded acting for advertising and is living with HIV, and the AIDS crisis presses in on the bohemia Larson is busy trying to write into a musical. Deleuze's phrase for that condition is that the people are missing: a community broken or not yet in existence, so the artist can no longer speak on its behalf and has to invent it instead. His word for the inventing is fabulation, catching someone in the act of legending themselves. Larson does it in front of us, from a stage, in the rock-band idiom he was writing toward in Rent and that Hedwig and the Angry Inch would later turn into a whole grammar of direct address. Garfield, a non-singer who trained to sing the part live, plays him at the edge of his own nerves, and the fray in the voice is part of the argument: the legend is being assembled by someone who can barely hold the note. He addresses us directly, and the register is testimony rather than dialogue. Deleuze would call that a speech act, a voice doing something instead of reporting it. The film's most delicate task is to dramatize the self-mythologizing without simply endorsing it, and it survives by making the myth-making audible as labor.

So what did this film move? Something small and durable. It shifts the movie musical's problem from spectacle to time. The numbers are not interruptions decorated onto a story; they are the story's memory system, which is why the editing rather than the choreography drew the Oscar nomination. It closes a loop, too. Miranda is a Larson devotee who has performed this show himself, so the ancestor being repaid is the one who made the descendant's career thinkable, and the craft came over intact from In the Heights the same year, Brooks and Kerstein included. And it was shot in New York in 2020, halted by the shutdown that emptied every theater on earth. A film about a man racing a clock, made in the year the clock stopped.

Watch it again for one thing. Find the exact frame where a song stops being performed and starts being remembered. You won't. That failure is the film. And take with you the question it refuses to settle: was the tick the thing killing him, or the beat he needed in order to write?