A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I really loved ‘Hamilton’ on Disney+, I was quite eager to check Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut. Well, while it was probably a passion project for Miranda, to be honest, I didn’t really have a connection with the material. The tricky thing is that, even though I’m well aware that ‘Rent’ was one of the most successful musicals ever produced, the only contact I had with this work was the film adaptation by Chris Columbus which didn’t really impress me. Furthermore, I’m not sure if mixing an actual stage performance with ‘Tick, Tick... Boom!’ with a rather straightforward biopic about Jonathan Larson was such a great idea. The other issue I had was that it was pretty obvious that ‘Superbia’ was just a way too ambitious project for an unestablished author. Indeed, I thought it is rather bewildering that during the whopping 7 years Larson had worked on it, nobody ever pointed this out, told him to put aside this huge project and work instead on something which might actually get produced. It was also a mistake to spend so much time on Larson supposedly struggling to write a new song. Indeed, it was a rather weak, predictable and, above all, completely unnecessary narrative gimmick. It also completely contradicted that the fact that Larson was displayed as being apparently some kind of genius who could write a song about anything within a few minutes. At least, I have to admit that the songs in this movie (all written by Jonathan Larson) were really catchy and I can imagine that the guy must have been a big inspiration for Miranda. Furthermore, even if I didn’t know Larson, Andrew Garfield still nailed another really strong performance here. Concerning the rest of the cast, I thought that Alexandra Shipp was really charismatic but, to be honest, the movie was really focused only on Larson so she didn’t have much to do. At least, this movie did display one of the most realistic and probably one of the best break-up scenes I have seen. It was also the first time I saw Vanessa Hudgens in a musical since the ‘High School Musical’ franchise and she actually impressed me, even if her character was not developed whatsoever. Seriously, she was basically born for this genre. Anyway, to conclude, even if it never really blew away, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.