→ January 24, 2022
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Klara and the Sun.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the greatest novelists currently writing in English, a deserving winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize (for The Remains of the Day), and author of two of the hundred best novels I’ve ever read (Remains and Never Let Me Go). His latest novel, Klara and the Sun, made the longlist for the Booker, finds him revisiting themes from several of his earlier works in another light science fiction milieu, in a work that is beautifully written but often seems too remote from its real subjects.

Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android that parents buy to serve as companions for their children, since school is now held remotely. Many children are also ‘lifted’ in what appears to be genetic engineering, but it’s a devil’s bargain – children must be lifted to have a chance of going to a suitable school, but there’s some risk of negative side effects, even death, from the procedure. Klara finds herself chosen to be the companion of Josie, a child who’s been lifted but is suffering significant illnesses because of it, and it’s implied that the lifting is part of why her parents are divorced. Artificial Friends get their power from the sun, so Klara comes to believe that the Sun is a god, or the God, and that this omnipotent being will be able to cure Josie – if Klara does something in return.

Because Klara narrates the book, we only get a superficial take on everything that happens, and details you might expect are not forthcoming (do not forthcome?). I’m just assuming ‘lifting’ means genetic engineering of some sort, for example. It arises that someone else in the world of these people has died, and we are left to infer the cause. There are great novels narrated by children or childlike characters – To Kill a Mockingbird is the most obvious example – but they amp up the level of difficulty for author and reader alike. Klara’s commentary is robotic, by design I assume, and it is the first way in which Ishiguro holds us at a distance from the text.

Klara and the Sun might be the loneliest novel I’ve ever read. The mere idea of Artificial Friends seems conjured out of a cloud of loneliness, and every character in this novel comes across as almost desperate in their lack of connection with others. There are few interactions here that don’t involve Klara, who is, to be clear, not an actual person. Josie’s parents are alienated from her as well as from each other, and their nearest neighbors, who live a mile or so away, are further separated from them because Rick, who is Josie’s age, was not ‘lifted.’ This near-future, which also includes replacement of even highly educated workers by robots or automation, seems neither that distant from ours nor that improbable, but it sounds apocalyptic in its isolation.

Klara’s relationship with the Sun feels like a parody of religious faith, or at least of a child’s concept thereof; Klara assumes that anything she doesn’t understand must be the Sun’s doing, and that the Sun can change anything if Klara simply believes enough – or makes an appropriate sacrifice. She also has a child’s conception of the world, seeing one small construction belching out smoke and assuming it is the only source of pollution on the planet. Klara convinces several other people to help her in her odd quest to appease the Sun and save Josie, but, without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the outcome leaves Klara with next to nothing in the end.

Ishiguro’s prose never fails to amaze; even in The Unconsoled, by far my least favorite of his novels even though its ambition is evident, he still writes beautifully, evoking rich images of time and place. It’s jarring in Klara and the Sun to see such classic, almost poetic prose used for a story that is relentless in its reserve. Klara had to be the narrator, and yet her childlike view of the world, including a limited emotional vocabulary, means that the novel lacks the emotional punch of Ishiguro’s other works – even Never Let Me Go, which had a similarly dystopian setup and story, but had a huge emotional payoff. Klara has the same distinctive voice and meticulous setup as I’ve come to expect from Ishiguro, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, which lived up to its billing.

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→ January 22, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/22/22.

I’m still grinding away on the top 100, with more than half of the player capsules written so far. It’ll run on January 31st, followed later that week by the column of guys who just missed. The team-by-team reports will run the week after. I have a podcast episode ready to roll that should be up any day now.

My latest review at Paste covers The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game from Funko based on the cult classic Disney film, which is itself about to get a reboot.

And now, the links…

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→ January 20, 2022
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Quo Vadis, Aida?

Quo Vadis, Aida? falls into the weird in-between category created by AMPAS’s alteration to the rules for Oscar eligibility last year: It wasn’t officially released in the United States until 2021, but was nominated for the Best International Film in the 2020 cycle because it was released before the end of February (and was submitted by Bosnia and Herzegovina). Available to stream on Hulu, with perhaps the most incongruous commercial breaks in film history, the film is an unstinting look at the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, mostly men, during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Aida is a translator for the UN’s peacekeeping force at the UNPROFOR base in Srebrenica, as well as a schoolteacher and mother of two teenaged boys. The film all takes place over a matter of hours as Serbian forces take over the town and residents flee, with several thousand entering the base but thousands more gathering outside to try to gain entry. Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic, now a convicted war criminal known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” offers safe passage out of Srebrenica to any Bosnian Muslims who wish it, but Aida is one of the few who suspects that the offer of safety is fake. She pleads with the Dutch peacekeepers to keep her family safe on the base, even as those same forces find themselves impotent in the face of Serbian arms, with the promised air support from NATO never materializing.

If you’re familiar with the Srebrenica massacre, you may have some idea how this is all going to turn out. Serb forces slaughtered more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, raped thousands of women and girls, and tortured more civilians. They threw the victims’ corpses in mass graves. Much of the massacre took place just outside of the base – the buses that were supposed to take the men to safety simply drove beyond the ‘safe’ area and emptied their passengers so Serb soldiers could murder them. Many of these war crimes were caught on film; some perpetrators were later charged by the Hague, including Mladic, although saying they were brought to justice implies justice is even possible in a case like this. The current mayor of Srebrenica and current Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska, one of the two divisions of the current government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both deny that the massacre and genocide even occurred.

Aida, played by Aida Selmanagi? – her husband plays Mladi? – is perfect as a woman who sees disaster impending and feels powerless to stop it, but will try anything to save her family. The tension on her face provides the film with all of the intensity of a thriller, even though there is no actual violence until near the very end of the story. Her desperation increases by degrees, as with the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, so that she may not fully realize how hopeless her situation is until well past the point that hope was gone. Aida survives, but there is no redemption in the ending here; if anything, the script underlines to the endless horror of those who do survive a genocide, and then are faced with daily reminders of what they’ve lost, of those who lost less (or even gained), and of those who did nothing while these crimes took place.

I don’t watch horror movies that rely on violence to create fear in the viewer, because I simply can’t adjust my mind to a worldview that finds entertainment in human suffering. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a horror movie of a different sort. You know this has to end badly for Aida and her family, somehow, because you know the world sat on its hands and watched as the Serbs murdered 8000-plus men simply because they were Muslims, as over 60,000 Bosniaks were killed in the war. You feel horror for Aida, and shame at the impotence of the peacekeepers and at the willful blindness of the west, rather than cheap fear from body horror or, worse, the lurid entertainment that some people feel from rooting for a killer. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great film, shouting an important piece of history from the hilltops, but it’s anti-entertainment by design. You want to avert your eyes, but if you do, you’re complicit in the crime.

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→ January 16, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/16/22.

Still working on the prospect rankings – I started the actual writing this week, after several weeks of prep – which will run starting January 31st at the Athletic. I appreciate your patience. My podcast and my Paste reviews will return this week.

And now, the links…

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→ January 14, 2022
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Mass.

Mass marks the directorial and writing debut of actor Fran Kranz, an actor who hasn’t done anything so far that might have indicated he was capable of this. Mass feels in so many ways like a stage play, with just four characters in one room constituting the vast majority of the film, and it pulls off a discussion of a difficult subject in an engrossing and credible way. (You can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Mass takes place at an Episcopalian church, almost entirely in a meeting room, where two couples, played by Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd, will meet some unknown period of time after a school shooting where a son of one couple killed the son of the other couple, and other classmates, before killing himself. The parents whose son committed the murders are no longer together, and have taken different paths – mom is wracked with guilt, and wants compassion, or at least more of a kinship with the grieving couple, while dad is still trying to absolve himself somehow and is bottling up his grief. Meanwhile, the parents of the victim are still deep in their grief, and can barely contain their rage when the conversation first turns to the killings. The meeting is unmoderated, but has been arranged by a counselor who seems to have worked with both couples; the four are simply left to their own devices. (I’m not saying which couple is which by design; it’s better to avoid knowing until the dialogue reveals it.)

The dialogue is raw and doesn’t flinch from its subject, including, at one point, a detailed description of the sequence of the murders. The parents share how they found out about the massacre not long after they were sharing photos of their kids, which appears to have been their pre-arranged conversation starter. The script shines when it centers their shared grief, how both couples lost sons that day, and how this isn’t some sort of Grief Olympics between them. Kranz doesn’t try to explain the inexplicable, other than to have the shooter’s father run through the litany of possible explanations – which follows an abortive discussion of gun laws in America. The victim’s parents ask the questions you’d expect, including why the killer’s parents didn’t do something to stop this, but Kranz doesn’t give any easy answers. The end of that conversation in the meeting room might be the only time the script loses its intensity, because the quartet reaches that point abruptly given what came before. It’s relentless without ever becoming lurid or otherwise pandering to retain your attention. It’s a story about one small bit of the aftermath of a school shooting, and Kranz never loses sight of that.

Mass has received a slew of honors from local critics’ circles and independent film groups, including taking the Robert Altman Award from the Independent Spirit Awards, won in recent years by Moonlight, Spotlight, One Night in Miami…, and Marriage Story. Dowd and Isaacs have each won a supporting actor award, although I’m not sure what makes either of them ‘supporting’ in this film. All four are great, but Dowd stands out – the script gives her the most to do, and she’s incredibly affecting both in her grief and her need to be understood by the other parents. The idea that Being the Ricardos might get a Best Original Screenplay nomination over this is … well, especially aggravating because the nomination would ensure more people know that Mass exists. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because it’s very talky, because it so resembles a play adapted to the screen, because it’s so unsparing of its topic. It is a tough watch, but it achieves everything Kranz could have wanted from his script.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Being the Ricardos.

Aaron Sorkin just can’t help himself: After directing The Trial of the Chicago Seven into an occasionally entertaining but bloated, self-important mess, he’s done it again with Being the Ricardos, and here the offense might actually be worse. This is a funny script about very funny people, one that touches on a couple of important topics, and Sorkin directs the audience right out of the film multiple times. (It’s free for Amazon Prime members.)

The film covers one week during the heyday of I Love Lucy, when a blind gossip item tagged Lucille Ball as a Communist, another tabloid story said that Desi Arnaz was unfaithful to Ball, and Lucille reveals that she’s pregnant, which was a huge complication for the highly censored, misogynistic medium of television in 1953. Those events all did take place, but in reality, they happened in separate weeks, and Sorkin condensed them all for (melo)dramatic purposes, which is small potatoes compared to other choices he made here. The conflation of three crises lends itself well to Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue – yes, we get walk-and-talks – and despite its lack of adherence to the truth, it probably improves the film on the whole.

Far and away the biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is Sorkin himself. He frames the movie with what are supposed to be interview clips with the show’s three main writers in something like the present day, although those three people have all been dead for at least ten years now. The interviews add nothing, and I mean nothing, to this movie, and at times are actively insulting, such as the scene near the very end of the movie when none of the three can remember Desi Arnaz’s catchphrase. I wanted to throw something at the TV. Sorkin makes his presence felt in plenty of other ways, not least in the many scenes that tell us just how incredibly important the work of television is, what a difficult art form it is, and uses that to tell us what a genius Lucille Ball was – except the whole thing rings very fake. A fair amount of the movie is devoted to Ball obsessing over the blocking in one scene, and I’d be shocked if any of that was true, including the bizarre 2 a.m. meeting she calls to go over it again.

The script does have a lot of humor in it – zingers, banter, sarcasm, you name it, and the actors bring the energy required to keep up with a script like this. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, a surprising result to those who follow this stuff, but she’s better here than Renée Zellweger in Judy or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, both of whom won Oscars for what amounted to very strong impersonations. Kidman gets the voice right, but the script doesn’t have her engage in much physical mimicry, focusing instead on the very wide range of emotions Ball would have felt if all of these things had happened in the span of a week. Kidman’s performance is superb, giving Ball depth and complexity; if you don’t think she’s worthy, it’s a comment on the film, not on her performance. Javier Bardem, as Desi, is right behind her, although in his case getting the accent right was critical and I could see an argument that his performance is more of an imitation than hers was. Tony Hale also deserves some mention for a quiet but essential performance as showrunner and head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and J.K. Simmons is very funny as William Frawley, playing him as a drunken asshole with occasional moments of clarity. I’m fine with Kidman getting a nomination, as seems likely, but if this gets a Best Original Screenplay nod over, say, Mass, I might throw something else, too.

Ball was not an actual card-carrying Communist, of course, and the controversy blew over quickly in reality; Sorkin sorkins it up with a very Hollywood ending that he fabricated, perhaps to match the incredible real-life resolution to the issue of CBS refusing to let Lucille be pregnant on the show. (The telegram in the movie is real.) Sorkin overdraws his dramatic license many times, but he does bring it all together for a strong finish, with Ball and Arnaz talking in her dressing room just before they go on stage … except the movie keeps going after that, and the second ending Sorkin gives us is worse. The film starts badly and ends badly, and even though much of what comes in between is funny and emotional, someone needed to tell Sorkin to trim all this fat and just let the two main characters carry the story.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Snow.

John Banville won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea and was shortlisted for the noirish The Book of Evidence, but he also writes mysteries featuring a pathologist named Quirke under the pen name Benjamin Black. He published a new mystery in 2021, titled Snow, under his own name, with references to Quirke but a new lead in detective St. John Strafford, whose first name is pronounced “Sinjin” and last name is mispronounced by everyone he meets. Banville can’t help but write beautifully, and he has crafted a narrative that zips right along, in a setup that could easily have come from an Agatha Christie novel … but my god, the ending is so predictable you could probably guess it from this setup: In the prologue, a priest is murdered, stabbed in the neck and then castrated. If a possible motive for someone to kill a priest in this way came to your mind, you probably got it right.

I’m a fan of classic English mysteries, especially those of Christie – I’m a Poirot guy, but I’ll read anything she wrote, and have read more books by her than by any other author. There´s something about the simple setup and intricate plotting that will always appeal to me; it’s similar to my taste in board games, where most of my favorites have simple rules that lead to complex strategies. There’s an elegance to it that I appreciate.

Banville follows the template to a tee, other than, perhaps, the detail of the gelding of the priest’s corpse. But is he subverting the genre, or playing it straight and just adding too little to the form to make it interesting? Banville’s prose evokes the setting, the place, and the cultural conflicts that lie beneath the surface of the story, including the Catholic/Protestant split in 1950s Ireland. The Osborne family, owners of the house where the priest died and where he was often a visitor, are Protestants, as is Strafford, which the Osbornes seem to think should make them allies, especially against the power of a Church that will eventually show up to lean on Strafford to let the truth lie. Yet the motive for the murder is mundane, and figuring out who did it won’t be difficult.

The novel also suffers from Strafford’s blandness: he’s neither likeable nor unlikeable, lacking the conceited air of Poirot or the wit of Archie Goodwin or the debonair of Lord Peter Wimsey. Strafford enters the book early enough to establish some sort of defining qualities for himself, even an eccentricity or two, but beyond his name and the running gag that everyone loses the ‘r’ in his surname when he introduces himself, there’s nothing.

Banville does seem to be making a bigger point here with this story, about Ireland, the Church, the aftereffects of trauma, and doing that in a murder mystery feels a bit off. I doubt Banville wanted to trivialize his subject, but that’s how it comes off in the end, especially with the last-minute twist to the resolution (which is also reasonably easy to see coming). There’s a follow-up novel coming this year called April in Spain that unites Strafford with Quirke, to be published under Banville’s own name rather than the pseudonym, and perhaps that will answer some of these questions. As much as I enjoyed reading Snow while I was in the middle of it, the ending revealed it to be just empty calories.

Next up: I’m reading Mike Schur’s upcoming book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, which, so far, is just as good as you’d expect.

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→ January 12, 2022
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The Lost Daughter.

The Lost Daughter is the directorial debut of actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also adapted the screenplay from an early novel by the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante, the mind behind the Neapolitan cycle of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as the same character in two different eras, the film presents a haunting portrayal of motherhood in a world that prefers mothers to exist in tightly constrained boxes.

Leda, a college professor of comparative literature and mother of two grown daughters, has come to a Greek island on a working vacation, with Colman playing her in the film’s present day. Shortly after her arrival, a boisterous American family arrives to disrupt her idyll, including a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. The girl goes missing on the beach one day, and Leda ends up the one who finds her – but Leda takes Elena’s doll, holding on to it even though the girl is inconsolable. Her subsequent interactions with the family trigger a series of flashbacks to when Leda was a young mother herself (where Buckley plays her), trying to balance her career and her two young daughters, with a husband who is unsupportive, to say the least. Leda’s memories, and the choices she made, invade on her present day, leading to erratic behavior and more questionable decisions.

Much of Ferrante’s work revolves around casual sexism in Italian society (a fair analogue for western society as a whole, but probably even more misogynistic than its peers), from who women marry to what they may do for work to how they’re expected to be mothers. At its most superficial level, The Lost Daughter shows Leda today coping with the weight of memories, and some regrets, over choices she made as a young mother, all because she’s seeing a young mother now whose husband doesn’t appreciate her and who herself may not fully appreciate her own daughter. Leda faced an untenable situation, trying to complete her graduate studies with two young children at home and a husband who believes his work takes priority. An academic conference gets her a brief respite from the dual life at home, and leads her the major inflection point of her life.

Leda in the present is a powder keg in search of a spark; the flashbacks show how the keg got its powder. Gyllenhaal gives us scene after scene of Leda struggling with one or both of her girls – at bath time, at meal time, and especially when she’s trying to work and her husband is nowhere in sight. It’s such an atypical and nuanced portrait of motherhood for the movies: Most movie mothers are saints, and if they’re not, they’re monsters. We see Leda losing her patience with her kids, or failing to respond to them as a mother “should” by the norms of the genre, and Gyllenhaal portrays it all without judgment or scorn. It is here that the film becomes whole, and solid, rather than superficial. The greatness of The Lost Daughter lies in how it treats Leda’s motherhood as aggressively normal.

The Lost Daughter loses something, no pun intended, when Leda starts to act bizarrely in the present, none more so than when she keeps the damn doll. The theft itself was plausible, but to continue to keep it when the child is wailing for it and her mother and family are desperate for its return just paints Leda as a terrible person. My interpretation, at least, is that what the world has done to Leda has led her to this point, whether she’s crazy, or delusional, or truly misanthropic, and that serves to undermine the more important theme here, that society is crazy, and misogynistic, and forced Leda into a choice she still can’t reconcile.

In Greek mythology, Leda is a young woman whom Zeus covets, so he takes the form of a swan, rapes her, and impregnates her. She gives birth to a girl, Helen – as in, of Troy – which is the Anglicized version of the name Elena. (Elena was my maternal grandmother’s name. She went by Helen.) Here, Elena isn’t Leda’s daughter, though; she’s the child on whom Leda seems to fixate when thinking about her own daughters, Bianca and Martha. Homer’s version of the myth has Helen abandoning her children to elope with Paris (or, possibly, being abducted), sparking the Trojan War. The Leda myth appears elsewhere in the movie, as Leda the character was a scholar and avid reader of Yeats, who wrote “Leda and the Swan” about the legend, so the allusion is clearly intentional.

Colman has already been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won Outstanding Lead Performance (an all-gender category) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. She’s a lock for an Oscar nod for the same, and deserving. At the same time, Jessie Buckley is just as pivotal to this film’s success, and overdue for this sort of accolade, delivering an outstanding performance in Beast and a similar one in Wild Rose to little fanfare. Buckley has less screen time to fill out the character of Leda the young mother, yet that character provides essential depth to the story; if Buckley can’t convince the viewer of the agony and struggle of Leda as a mother and striving academic, the present-day parts that were already shaky would collapse. Gyllenhaal should be in the running for nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (likely) and Best Director (unlikely, given the category’s extensive historical bias against women).

This might be the best movie I’ve seen so far from 2021, and if not, it offers the most fodder for consideration after it ended. There’s more here than one blog post, by one writer, who also happens to be a man, could possibly cover.

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→ January 8, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/8/22.

My latest game review for Paste covers the great, easy-to-learn Super Mega Lucky Box, from the designer of Silver & Gold and Sushi Go! It has elements of both games, and will remind non-gamers of bingo enough to get them started. We played this over the holidays with my family, and everyone liked it, from my 9-year-old niece to my mother, who generally does not like games.

My prospect rankings are still on track to start running on The Athletic on January 31st, leading off with the top 100, with team-by-team rankings following afterwards. My podcast will also return this upcoming week.

And now, the links…

  • The Guardian hasan excerpt of Michael Pollan’s most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants, asking whether we should be giving up caffeine. (The answer is “no,” whether Pollan knows it or not.)
  • This Hidden Brain episode titled “Both Things Can Be True,” about dealing with the apparent contradictions we find in other people, is a remarkable and compelling story in its own right, and also feels especially apposite in the wake of the recent Hall of Fame vote. You can also find it on iTunes.
  • Is there really enough taste difference among different varieties of rice to justify an annual rice-tasting competition? The mere question would be heretical in Japan.
  • Climate change is coming for everyone and every industry, including pro sports. Hannah Keyser asks if MLB is ready for it.
  • “America’s Frontline Doctors” are a giant fraud, as its members haven’t worked on the front lines against COVID-19 and profit off quack treatments like hydroxychloroquine.
  • A Deputy DA in California who was expected to run for the state Assembly this year has died of COVID-19 at age 46, just weeks after speaking an anti-vax/anti-mandate rally.
  • I don’t especially care that an Australian writer doesn’t like board game nights, but what possible aim is there to writing a piece that does nothing but shit on something thousands of people enjoy?
  • The New York Times‘ David Streitfeld has a post mortem of sorts on the Theranos trial, with an eye on the people who failed to ask Elizabeth Holmes the obvious questions about her technology that didn’t work. John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood has quite a bit more on this in its history of the con.
  • Alec Karakatsanis, founder of the Civil Rights Corps, has been critical of mainstream media outlets’ slanted coverage of police shootings. He had a Twitter thread this week calling out the New York Times for its framing and for use of biased sources when covering a recent shooting in LA, pointing out that police unions and departments spend a lot of money to try to get this kind of positive coverage.
  • Asmodee’s Unexpected Games division announced a new title, Voices in My Head, where players try to play aspects of a suspected thief’s persona against the one player who plays the prosecutor.
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→ January 6, 2022
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tick, tick … BOOM!

tick, tick … BOOM! is the ‘other’ Jonathan Larson musical, the one he wrote and performed himself a handful of times before he finished and sold Rent. As you probably know, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm, likely the result of undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, the night before Rent opened. That makes the story of tick, tick … BOOM! even more poignant – and sometimes painful – to watch: It’s about a young would-be playwright who is about to turn 30 and is wondering if he’ll ever get a play produced, or if he has to give up his dream and find a ‘regular’ job like his roommate Michael.

Lin-Manuel Miranda directed this film from Steven Levenson’s adaptation of Larson’s stage musical, splitting the film into two threads: A live performance of the play itself, powered by Andrew Garfield as Larson, and recreations of scenes from Larson’s life to which he refers within the play. At the time that he wrote this play, Larson was working at a diner while trying to get his first play, a dystopian sci-fi musical called Superbia that was loosely based on 1984, produced. His difficulties and his approaching birthday have led him to an existential crisis, and to a breaking point with his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who gets a big opportunity in western Massachusetts that would force her to move out of New York. Larson’s roommate, Michael (Robin de Jesús), has given up his acting dreams to take a job in advertising, earning a steady income that’s enough to get him a better apartment and a fancy car. The story takes place against the backdrop of late 1980s/early 1990s New York, especially the AIDS crisis, with one of Jonathan’s co-workers dealing with the disease (which became a major subtheme in Rent as well).

Garfield is tremendous here as Larson – he’s brimming with enthusiasm and dry wit when he’s doing the stage part, anxious and frazzled and torn in different directions when he’s in Larson’s regular life. He carries the movie, even with a raft of strong supporting performances, including Shipp, de Jesús, and a surprisingly strong turn from Vanessa Hudgens as his foil in the stage play. It hinges on the lead, though, given how much of the movie is him singing and talking on the stage, and he delivers. I’d be floored if he didn’t join Will Smith among the Best Actor nominees for the Oscars this year.

I didn’t see Rent during its 12-year run on Broadway, or any of its tours; I’ve only seen the recording of the last date of that initial run, and have listened to the soundtrack. I know the music well enough now to know that it’s much better than the music in tick, tick … BOOM! This musical doesn’t have anywhere near the memorable numbers of Larson’s magnum opus – a tautological argument, since that’s why Rent is his magnum opus in the first place – but this film feels like the double A version of Rent‘s big leagues. These songs sound like they come from Larson in both music and lyrics, but they lack the strong hooks of “Seasons of Love,” “Take Me or Leave Me,” “Light My Candle,” or “La Vie Bohème.” The best song here might be the finale, “Louder Than Words,” which is the song that would sound most at home in Rent. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge this musical against a critically acclaimed juggernaut, but that’s the inevitable result of a compelling story that adheres so closely to Larson’s real life.

That might imply that tick, tick … BOOM! isn’t worth watching – it is. Being less than Rent is hardly an insult. The plays differ primarily in how the stories differ: This is autofiction, where Rent is a broad study of a set of characters, a time, and a place. It’s more than a historical artifact, not just of interest only because Rent became a Broadway classic, but my honest response was that it was fun and enjoyable but the music didn’t hit me like I want a musical’s soundtrack to.

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