Tick, Tick Boom ending explained: Does Jon get his play produced?

Tick, Tick Boom follows the life of musical theater writer Jonathan Larson. The movie takes place in New York City days shy of Jon’s 30th birthday in 1990.

He sees the upcoming milestone as the nail in the coffin of his youth and believes he has nothing to show for his twenties which were spent on writing his play, Superbia, that still isn’t finished.

Spoilers ahead of Tick, Tick Boom

The sci-fi rock opera set in the distant future is a song away from completion. However, Jon has yet to find the lyrics or the melody for the character Elizabeth’s solo that Stephen Sondheim says is crucial to the play.

Tick, Tick Boom spends much of its runtime working through Jon’s writer’s block as he hustles to put the money together for the workshop that could change his career forever. But as he does so, his relationships begin to strain under his ambitiousness that has triggered a selfish streak.

His girlfriend, Susan, needs Jon to make a decision on whether or not he’s going to move to the Berkshires with her. She’s a talented dancer who’d be on the precipice of her own big break before she suffered an injury. Though Susan is back to dancing, she’s tired of the daily grind in the city just to get an inch forward in her career.

While she’s ready to move on and work toward a more stable life, Jon isn’t and he continues to put her off about his decision until she finally gets tired of it and confronts him. In the middle of their fight, Susan confesses that she never expected Jon to tell her he’d leave New York behind and move with her.

She’d hoped that he asked her to stay and the fact that he didn’t told her everything she needed to know about where she stood in his life. It was a heartbreaking moment that spelled the end to their relationship in a way neither of them had been prepared for but it did inspire the song Jon needed to finish Superbia.

Does Jon get Superbia produced in Tick, Tick Boom?

Jon’s workshop was a success. His agent, Rosa, who had been ghosting him for a year did manage to get quite a few producers to come to the workshop. Sondheim also made an appearance. But, despite the consensus that Superbia was a promising and beautiful musical, no one was willing to fund a Broadway or even an Off-Broadway run of Jon’s work.

Rosa explained that they were all excited for what Jon could bring to the musical theater world and couldn’t wait to see his next project but Superbia was too out-there and high concept to get people to buy tickets.

It was a hard pill for Jon to swallow as she taught him something all writers need to learn eventually. You have to keep writing and putting your work out there. Not all of it’s going to stick no matter how good it is. Jon’s play showcased his brilliance and he learned from writing it but now he needs to move on to the next project and write about what he knows.

After a bit of a wallowing, an emotional talk with his best friend Michael, and Sondheim reaching out to him to set-up a meeting to talk about his play, Jon gets to work on tick, tick…Boom! his autobiographical musical about his time working on Superbia.

Yes, that play is the source material for this movie and the scenes of Jon playing piano and detailing events of what happened in the days before his birthday are actually how the real Jonathan Larson acted out the musical when he performed it.

The play that Larson worked on after tick, tick…Boom! is the modern classic Rent which has been beloved for nearly 20 years. Larson died before he could see its first public performance but many of the themes displayed in the play are some of the same ones he was working through in tick, tick…Boom!

The movie adaptation of his autobiographical musical displays this through Jon’s bohemian lifestyle, his ragtag group of friends from different backgrounds, the looming specter of the AIDS epidemic, and the look and feel of New York in the ’90s from attitudes to style.

Tick, Tick Boom is available to stream now on Netflix.