120 min | PG-13 | November 12, 2021 | Netflix
A struggling composer waits tables, turns thirty, and watches the clock run out on the musical that has eaten his twenties. Andrew Garfield sings every note himself and never stops sweating. The panic is the point.
Jonathan Larson is a thirty-year-old composer who waits tables in SoHo and chases a Broadway musical nobody will produce. The clock in the title is his own panic. He turns thirty in eight days, the age Stephen Sondheim broke through, and Larson has nothing to show but a futuristic rock opera that has consumed years of his life. The film stages his story as the autobiographical solo show he wrote, then cuts between that performance and the life that produced it. It is about the terror of running out of time before the work is finished.
Andrew Garfield plays Larson with a live-wire desperation that never settles. He does his own singing, and the strain in his voice during the panic numbers reads as character rather than limitation. Alexandra Shipp plays Susan, the dancer he loves and keeps stranding for the next deadline. Robin de Jesús plays Michael, the friend who quits art for an advertising salary and a sports car, and the two men’s diner scenes carry the real cost of Larson’s choices. Vanessa Hudgens cuts through as Karessa in the workshop sequences. Bradley Whitford appears as Sondheim in a handful of scenes that function as the verdict Larson is waiting for.
Lin-Manuel Miranda directs his first feature and stacks the film with theater-world cameos that reward the faithful. Steven Levenson writes the script, braiding the stage monologue with flashback so the songs detonate inside the memories that birthed them. The editing is the engine here. The cross-cut “Therapy” number splits a couple’s fight across two rooms and a piano, and the workshop performance of “Come to Your Senses” intercuts the song with the woman it is about until the two collapse into one image. The cutting keeps the film sprinting even when the structure overloads.
The film runs hot and crowded, and it sometimes mistakes velocity for depth. Larson’s selfishness gets softened by the knowledge of what he goes on to make, and Miranda is too reverent to push hard on it. What holds is Garfield. He plays a man who cannot tell whether he is a genius or a failure and refuses to stop working long enough to find out. That refusal is the movie, and it is enough.