How a musical was born -- almost

 

         When I was a much younger man living in Manhattan, I met lots of people. Some of them were actors. I won’t name names, but one became a major star. Only one.

          The majority of young people who head to New York seeking a niche in the arts find impoverishment, heartbreak, and crushed dreams. New York teaches painful lessons: The world owes you nothing. All you'll ever achieve is a bit of status on the fringes of the endeavor you love. Maybe you won’t even get that far.

          The risk: You become too old to be considered promising. You have no fallback, and you’re unemployable. Such is the gamble.

          Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut deals with someone who took the risk. Tick, Tick ... Boom! explores the life of playwright/composer Jonathan Larson before he hit the big time with his award-winning musical Rent.  

          It’s not surprising that Miranda chose Larson’s play for his directorial debut. He knows this milieu. He was part of it. 

          And like Larson, Miranda, still best known for Hamilton, helped remake the musical form. Here, he revels in the energy of a diverse group of performers bursting with a singular ambition: to have their voices heard.

      Those familiar with Larson’s story also know that it ended with an unexpected and shattering exclamation point. Larson died in 1996 of an aortic aneurism on the day of Rent's first Off-Broadway preview. He was 35.

       So Tick, Tick ... Boom! is a sad movie? Not really.

       It's an upbeat look at a struggling composer who's trying to establish himself in musical theater. Tick, Tick … Boom! focuses on Larson's efforts to put on a workshop performance of Superbia, a futuristic musical based on George Orwell's 1984. 

     As Larson, Andrew Garfield puts the movie on his shoulders and carries it a long way; he's the focal point in an aspirational world that swirls with talent, hope and energy.

    Miranda organizes the musical around a performance of Tick, Tick ... Boom!, a show Larson performs on a bare stage with a piano and back-up band. Numbers from the stage play mix with depictions of Larson's bohemian life in New York City. 

   The mood ranges from excitement to the desperation Larson experiences as he tries to write the song that will complete Superbia. The story also deals with the AIDS onslaught that has begun to thin the ranks of the creative class, striking close to home for Larson.

    Miranda brings a few additional characters into focus.

    Robin de Jesus portrays Michael, a gay singer who traveled to New York with Larson but who tires of rejection and poverty. Michael opts for a more stable life in advertising. 

   Larson's girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp) remains committed to him until she realizes that Larson uses intimacy to discover emotion for his songs. He’s too involved with his work to make a relationship succeed.

    Judith Light has a late-picture turn as the agent who gives Larson a tough lesson about the vagaries of theatrical endeavor.

     Larson supports himself by working as a waiter at SoHo's  Moondance Diner, a job that pays for the crummy apartment where he lives with an Everest of dishes piled in the sink.

   There's not much suspense about the outcome. Roughly half way through, musical master Steven Sondheim (Bradley Whitford) shows up to ratify Larson's talent. It's clear that the young man eventually will find a vehicle to propel his career. 

   Garfield, who does his own singing, pours on the energy -- sometimes to the point of annoyance and the movie's desire to celebrate the exuberant diversity that hit New York during the 1990s doesn't feel quite as fresh as it once might have.  

    Mostly, though, the movie remains engaging. Miranda works in a quick-cut, pop-and-flash style that reminded me a bit of director Jon M. Chu's colorful approach to the movie version of Miranda’s play,  In the Heights.

    Tick, Tick can be taken as an updated version of the “Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show” school of entertainment -- only smarter, more articulate and more driven.

     Perhaps fondness for its characters explains why at two hours in length Tick, Tick hangs on longer than it should.  It’s not only Larson who’s being celebrated and remembered; it's the dreams of youth.

      

     

A foray into crime on the dark web

 

   Silk Road, a movie about an entrepreneurial young man who enters the drug trade, is based on a Rolling Stone article by David Kushner. I hadn't read the article which appeared in 2014, so I was only vaguely familiar with the story about how Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) built a thriving drug market on the dark web. 

   Perhaps to salve his conscience, Ulbricht cloaked his felonious activity in fuzzy libertarian thinking, constructing rationales about the moral obligation to evade regulation, an argument that has a familiar ring thanks to some of today’s more strident anti-government voices.

    So, no, I didn't know much about Ulbricht's story, and wasn't familiar with his early forays into the mysteries of Bitcoin. But that doesn't mean that director Tiller Russell's high-tech procedural didn't feel familiar, another cynical foray into a badly corrupted world.

    Having said that, I can’t say that familiarity bred much by way of contempt, maybe because the movie hits enough genre marks to prove modestly engaging.

    Russell tempers the technical aspects of Ulbricht's story by setting up a stylistic conflict between Ulbricht and a grab-em-by-the-throat cop, played by Jason Clarke, whose performance holds the movie together. 

   Compromised and decidedly old-school in his approach to policing, Clarke's Rick Bowden, has been banished to a cyber-sleuthing unit of the DEA. He's just gotten out of rehab for his own drug abuse.

     Populated by hot-shots with advanced degrees, the cyber crimes unit instantly turns Bowden into the proverbial fish out of water. But he refuses to sit on his hands. 

     Desperate to catch up with his younger colleagues, he recruits a small-time criminal from his former life (Darrell Britt-Gibson) to teach him about computers and the dark web.

    Bowden attains enough mastery of the online world to create an artificial persona that puts him into close cyber association with the young man he's hunting.

    Amoral and ambitious, we know from the outset that Ulbricht's hubris eventually will lead his downfall and it hardly qualifies as a surprise when his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp) begins sounding alarms about dangerous behavior.

    Tiller, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, does a reasonably good job of untangling the complexities of Ulbricht's scheme and there's enough upholstery (glimpses of Ulbricht's family and of Bowden's domestic life) to save the movie from one-note repetition.

    In keeping with the movie's cynicism, Bowden never emerges as a heroic figure. We're in a world where blurred lines prove pervasive, not exactly a groundbreaking slant for movies of this ilk but a genre requirement nonetheless.

  Who knows? Silk Road may turn out to be a pioneering effort as cybercrime begins to replace street crime in the pop-cultural vocabulary. Or, perhaps it's just another straight-on helping of big-screen crime. 

    That’s not a bad thing but it doesn’t make for the most memorable of movies.

The Shaft family adds another generation

The new version of Shaft can be funny and brash, but it's also scattered and its unashamed political incorrectness can be grating.

One of them is hopelessly old school. That means he’s homophobic and misogynistic. He has built a reputation on the streets with his fists, his guns and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

The other is a millennial, an MIT graduate who works in data analysis at the FBI. He’s brainy and culturally adept, comfortable with the social fluidity of a multicultural world.

The gimmick: Both are named Shaft. They're father and son.

John Shaft, you’ll recall is the iconic black detective who emerged in the 1970s as part of the Blaxploitation wave that kept turnstiles spinning. In director Tim Story's new version of Shaft, the youngest Shaft (Jessie Usher) hasn't seen his rogue father in years.

The twist: The son must turn to his street-wise dad for help in discovering who murdered his best friend, a Muslim veteran (Avan Jogia) who seemed to be getting his life together after going through a difficult time with drugs.

I’m not sure what Story had in mind with this new version of Shaft, which checks so many boxes you might call it with a multiple choice movie. It’s a buddy comedy (albeit between father and son), an action thriller with a plot that’s so disposable you don’t really need to follow it, a generational comedy in which a son continually taps the breaks on his father’s out-dated, politically incorrect views on women and gays, as well as a movie that features high-caliber weapons taking out what can seem like hordes of bad guys.

Samuel L. Jackson portrays Shaft, as he did in director John Singleton’s 2004 entry into the Shaft series. The role, of course, dates back to the 1971 original and a variety of sequels starring Richard Roundtree, who makes a movie-stealing appearance late in this edition.

To reiterate: Jackson's Shaft is the son of Roundtree's Shaft and the father of Usher's Shaft. Got it?

Here’s something to consider. Jackson is 70. Roundtree is 76. The movie tells us Jackson’s Shaft is 60. Even at that, the math doesn’t quite work. Oh well, looking for realism in this version of Shaft is about as useful as thinking you’re going to get through the movie without a substantial quotient of MF expletives. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you have no business seeing the movie anyway.

Jackson has played variations of this character before; his performance not only reprises his previous work as Shaft but includes echoes of Jules, the hitman he played in Pulp Fiction.

All of this results in a hit-and-miss affair, a movie that's probably best seen with a large audience that’s willing to get raucous — roughly in the way the ‘70s movies were received.

Story tries to evoke ‘70s nostalgia with Shaft’s throwback attitudes, with a score that makes ample use of the Isaac Hayes' theme from the original and with an immersion in the mean streets of Harlem -- not to mention the suede dusters you see all three characters wearing in the movie's sequel-promising final shot.

Usher makes a fine foil for Jackson, slowly emerging as something less than the guy his father accuses him of being. Jokes about whether Usher's JJ can be called a "real" man embody the movie’s conflicted spirit. Yes, some of these jokes can be taken as insulting and even homophobic. I guess they're supposed to explain how an out-of-touch father tries to taunt a son who grew up with his mother and who's fluent in the language of the 21st century.

So can these two men find a single page on which both can thrive — and, oh yeah, solve the mystery at the movie’s core?

You already know the answer. Turns out that Shaft the Younger is skilled with guns and well-trained in a Brazilian form of martial arts and both men are capable of laying out their enemies without feeling an iota of compunction about taking human lives.

Women in Shaft basically serve the plot. Mom (Regina Hall) isn’t around for much of the movie; young shaft’s love interest (Alexandra Shipp) has a bit more to do. But when they do appear, these women have no trouble establishing their presence, claiming equal footing with the male characters.

Did I laugh at some of the comedy? Yes. Did I find the violence excessive and not stylish enough to turn into something that could be appreciated purely on cinematic terms, as we might in a John Wick movie? Yes to that, as well. Were the jokes about gays a bit repetitive? Yes, again. Did the movie get better when Roundtree finally makes his appearance? Another yes. Was there at least one piece of action that caught me by surprise. Well, there would have been had I not already seen it in the movie's trailer.

So where do I stand on Shaft?

The whole movie may be too preposterous to take offense; remember Story also directed two Ride Along movies. But know this as well, there’s no character here who’s likely to attain the iconic status of the original Shaft. That movie was tightly wedded to its time. This one is less of its time than it is a spawn of dozens of other movies. As I said at the outset, a box checker.

How much you enjoy it depends on how many of those boxes you're able to check.