Andrew Garfield in Tick, Tick…. BOOM! (Netflix)

It seems a pretty shallow endeavor to write a quarter-life crisis, one-man musical at the age of 29. It seems even more misguided to make a movie of it some 30 years later and expect it to play to the masses. But this musical was written by Jonathan Larson, and this film was directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The result is glorious.

For those not in the know, Larson wrote Rent, a watershed moment in musical theater history. He brought the rock musical kicking and screaming into the 1990s and featured characters one hardly saw on a Broadway stage, much less in a Broadway musical: a drag queen, people who are HIV positive, people of color, poor people. Modern musical theater would not exist without it. There would be no Dear Evan Hansen, no Spring Awakening, and certainly no Hamilton. Broadway in the ’90s did not cater to young adults. They had rock music or hip-hop instead. Until Rent. Larson spoke to them, their struggles, their insecurities, which were different than those of the generation that gave us Hair or Pippin. Larson did it honestly and eloquently. Then he died from an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996.

Tick, Tick…. BOOM! serves as much of a celebration of Larson’s life as it is an adaptation of the 1991 title musical, which premiered off-Broadway in 2001. Screenwriter Steven Levenson and Miranda flesh out a lot, adding characters and new dialogue. This is just as much their film as Larson’s.

The plot is simple enough. Starving young composer Jonathan Larson has a workshop present of a musical for producers coming up in a week’s time. He is trying to prepare for that while attempting to write an absolutely essential song for it, and he’s coming up blank. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), has gotten a job out of the city and asks him if she should take it. His best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús), is moving out of the apartment, and the composer hasn’t paid the electric bill in God knows how long. Also, he’s pushing 30 and feeling oncoming irrelevance.

So, the screws get twisted as the film goes along, as one would suspect as it navigates a well-trod path. There are no real surprises. What gives Tick, tick… BOOM juice is a charming and feverish lead performance by Andrew Garfield, an unsurprisingly good collection of songs, and Miranda’s fluid, fast-paced direction. For theater buffs, there are oodles and oodles of cameos. Everyone from Phillipa Soo to André De Shields to Stephen Schwartz shows up here.

Garfield, as Larson, looks very much like an overgrown kid who can’t believe he’s won the lottery. He is living his best life, and when things start going south, the way Garfield portrays the tension of the building pressure, a sidelong glance here, his leg jittering ever so slightly there, draws us in. It’s a wonderful performance of control and release. When he gets behind the piano to sing and play, that child within bounds out of him again.

Larson, like many artists, struggling and otherwise, can come across as selfish, and Miranda suffers no illusions here. This is a love letter to theater and artists, though artists can lock out and/or use their loved ones as inspiration. They can also be blasé about others’ emotions while wallowing in their own. It is all here in its somewhat narcissistic glory. Yet, when all hope is lost and the big ballad comes in and Garfield sings about the joy of creating and just spending the day composing, it not only replicates but equals the show stopping number of *insert your favorite Broadway* musical here. All is forgiven.

For the layman or casually theater goer, Tick, Tick… BOOM! will come across as a very good film. For theater lovers, it will be manna from heaven. For theater makers and artists, particularly those who are still struggling, it will be as essential as air.