Movie Nation

The holidays are built for binge-watching, with the big blocks of “down time” taking the form of working your tail off to cook, clean for and keep visiting family entertained.

OK, you get to “Maid” your way, I (finally) get around to it mine.

Viewers have responded to this often-gripping account of a single mother struggling with homelessness, escaping an abusive relationship and coming to terms with a family legacy that has seemingly always-included those burdens, a series based on the memoir of a Montana mom — Stephanie Land — who experienced the grim nuts-and-bolts of what we see on the screen.

By that I mean the bureaucracy, the paperwork, the simple logistics of living out of your car with a toddler and finding some safe place for her to be while you deal with every Catch-22 of your situation.

You’ve got to have a job to qualify for housing aid. You need to have filed a police report to get certain forms of help. The best job available to the under-educated and unqualified is maid work, and even working for a contract maid service costs the employee money (cleaning supplies) and requires a car.

The average American sees people like this every day, uniformed and haggard, over-stuffed cars often carrying their every portable possession. The dead give away? They bear the look of someone uncared for.

Such people rarely look like Margaret Qualley, the “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” breakout, a model-thin beauty with her mother Andie MacDowell’s cheekbones, hair and eyes, if not her glamorous sheen.

But in casting Qualley as Alex, the impoverished young woman facing such dire straights, series creator Molly Smith Metzler scores not just a terrific actress for her lead, but makes a point of avoiding the stereotypes of this sort of woman dealing with this sort of poverty. They aren’t just Black or LatinX, rural and Southern.

You can’t always see “poor decisions” written in their appearance or inked all over their arms like Land’s.

We meet Alex as she’s fleeing the trailer she shares with now-ex-partner Sean (Nick Robinson of “Love, Simon” and TV’s “Love, Victor”), a rageaholic drunk who works as a bartender.

That first night showing us a very young woman with a two year-old (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) impulsively discovering that her “support system” is irresponsible, party animal peers from the coastal Washington state bar scene, or her flakey, narcissistic artist-mom (played by Qualley’s real-life mother, MacDowell).

There is no safe harbor. They’re stuck in the car. The coming episodes will serve up a series of obstacles, the Catch-22s I mentioned earlier, as Alex and little Maddy fend off the dangerous but clingy Sean and slowly hoist themselves into “the system.”

Alex sees a running tally of her $18-and-shrinking finances and imagines judgement in every “clean up on aisle POOR” (how she hears it) sales clerk or “poor white trash” and worse from the social services worker (Amy Reid) who points out every hoop she must jump through, with an implied “every thing you’ve ever done wrong” in her questions.

“Are you on drugs? Can you prove” that’s your little girl?

“I can show you my stretch marks!”

As she “can’t do squat” without a pay-stub, Alex takes social worker Jody’s recommendation to try Value Maids. As Yolanda (Tracy Vilar) testily lists all the ways this job won’t actually support her and her daughter, Alex is adding up the net, gross and overhead of work that looks, right from the start, like indentured servitude — a poverty trap.

And if that aloof, first under-paying wealthy client (Anika Noni Rose) whose house requires a long, pricey ferry ride to her tony island mansion takes it on herself make Alex’s life harder by rejecting the work to her boss, that means a late-night return trip on said ferry to said island.

That’s when the generally complacent Maddy acts out, and that’s how Alex makes one more bad decision that ends in a car wreck, leaving them not just homeless but carless.

I love the way Metzler (“Shameless,” “Casual” and “Orange is the New Black” credits) and her writers lay out the nuts-and-bolts of poverty in America, showing us a “system” staffed by generally compassionate women (BJ Harrison runs a shelter) who, like “sponsors” in AA, can’t do the work for you.

This world of dollar store cleaning supplies — and toys for the toddler — tiny dollops of gas to get you from job to job and then having to deal, one-on-one, with rich, luxuriously-appointed and well-fed clients who only cheap-out on paying their servants, will depress any compassionate viewer of “Maid.”

The scripts take pains to show Alex’s one-time writing ambitions, but skimp on the string of decisions that she made that helped put her here. Flashbacks show us her days waitressing in a bar, Sean showing up with a book and thus getting her attention, and the unplanned pregnancy that punched an unhealthy young romance right in the gut.

Sean’s “emotional violence” — threats, “control” etc. — is played-up here, covering new dramatic and legal ground when such characters are generally captured after the physical abuse has started.

“Before they bite, they bark,” shelter-manager Denise (Harrison) warns.

But if anything, “Maid” sugar coats the harsh realities of Alex’s lot. Her ex, his mean “oxy-addict” mother and a lawyer they hire take her child away. Alex is lost in court, hearing the lawyer and the judge’s exchanges as a quacking “Legal legal legal legal” in her head.

She gets Maddy back too easily. A wealthier old friend who crushes on her and gives her a well-cared for old Ford Explorer. The mean rich lady softens. As fresh obstacles rise up, we never lose the sense that Alex will easily rise above them, and never for a second give away the grime and wear people in these circumstances carry on their faces.

And for all the pains the series goes to in avoiding serving up the caricatured abuser, uncaring social worker or what have you, none of that applies to MacDowell’s mother figure. Paula is a hippy-dippy free-spirit so wrapped up in herself and her new — younger and “Australian” — man (Toby Levins) that she can barely take a breath to show her child and grandchild the compassion they deserve, by instinct.

Paula’s exaggerated flightiness, casual cruelty and unwillingness to accept her daughter’s dire read on her situation aren’t reflected in Alex in any direct apple-tree sense. Metzler is willing to judge the hell out of the mother, and unwilling to judge the daughter at all?

Less colorful yet more interesting is the way Alex’s father (Billy Burke of the “Twilight” saga) tries to help, but with Alex giving us plenty of hints as to why there are limits to what she’ll accept from him.

“Maid” has textbook “abusive relationship” foreshadowing (Women fall back into situations they’re escaping from many times before managing that final break.), journalistically-detailed dissections of “the system” and an engaging, empathetic leading lady in Qualley.

Qualley and Metzler give us a heroine too smart to ever mistakenly believe that the abuse is her fault, that her circumstances cannot be overcome and that if the supportive strangers surrounding her could do it, that there’s any reason she won’t be able to either.

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Margaret Qualley, Andie MacDowell, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, BJ Harrison, Tracy Vilar, Billy Burke and Rylea Nevaeh Whittet

Credits: Created by Molly Smith Metzler, based on the memoir “Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive,” by Stephanie Land. A Netflix release.

Running time: 10 episodes @40-50 minutes each

As Advent is now upon us — the original Catholic countdown to Christmas before America invented “Shopping Days” to keep better track — this is the perfect season to unleash a horror movie about an evil artifact attached to this holiday.

Hey, nobody even MENTIONED Elf-on-a-shelf.

“The Advent Calendar” is a creeper of a thriller. It stalks you, sidles up and immerses the viewer in its world and its mood. This Belgian film (in French and German with English subtitles) doesn’t deliver frights or shocks so much as it serves up shivers.

Actor turned writer-director Patrick Ridremont’s clockwork screenplay presents a chilly artifact — the 24 day wall-hanging calendar with key-locked “doors” for each of the days approaching Christmas. And it gives us “rules.”

The movie is “The Ring” or “Ouija” with a Christian calendar that dispenses candies behind each day’s potentially deadly door.

Eugénie Derouand plays Eva, a poker-faced beauty who gets hit-on in the public swimming pool, right up to the moment she crawls into her wheelchair. She used to be a dancer, now she’s paraplegic.

We meet her on her birthday, get a taste of her solitary life (she lives with her dog) and work (selling insurance).

She’d love to talk to her father (Jean-François Garreaud) on her special day. But he’s deep into dementia, and his shrew of a second wife (Isabelle Tanakil) has no interest in nurturing that relationship. Like Eva’s crude and unfiltered boss (Jérôme Paquatte), Evil Stepmom can’t be bothered to filter her insensitive language when talking to or about Eva’s “condition.”

Not to worry. As Eva’s birthday coincides with the start of Advent, her bestie Sophie (Honorine Magnier) hot-to-trots her way back from Germany with a special gift — a wooden Advent calendar.

It’s got a threat wood-burned into the back. “Dump me, and I’ll kill you.” And there are other “rules.” Behind each date-door, there’s a candy. “Eat one candy, you eat them all.” Fail to do this? “I’ll kill you.”

As the calendar is from Germany, these operating instructions/threats are delivered in German, which Sophie reads and speaks.

“Ich bring dich um” sounds “pretty grim.”

“Germans are grim!”

As Eva likes the type of candy in the first compartment — it’s her father’s favorite — she buys in. Later that day, she gets a pleasant, short birthday call from her father.

Wait. What? Was the candy drugged? “Are you still taking your anti-hallucination pills?”

Eva picks up on what’s happening quicker than Sophie or anyone else. She eats this candy, thinking of her Dad, and he experiences a flash of sentience. Eat that one that comes with the card that says “To cure hurt, destroy what hurt you” and something more sinister is in store.

What can that mean? Well, for one thing, that creep who sexually assaulted her while giving her a lift home from the club had better listen when Eva screams “Drop DEAD!” as he dumps her and her wheelchair into the street.

One of the clever touches in Ridremont’s “24 Days of Death” script is the calendar itself. A disembodied German voice speaks from inside it, a pop-up of a crucifix-wearing monk that appears after something has happened appears to be the mysterious threatening “Ich” or “I.”

And when boorish, brutish Boris tosses Eva from his Mercedes, a toy G-Wagon rolls out of one of the doors, and Martin, Eva’s dog, sees it and figures its a new chew toy. Whoa. Hate to be inside a “real” SUV while that was happening.

The malleability of the “rules” and the degrees of cleverness in the various ways the calendar “punishes” Eva, someone who wronged her or someone who loves her, puts fresh wrinkles in this somewhat conventionally-structured thriller.

The pace is seriously slack, providing time for Eva to be twisted by what she can see is going on, and to turn greedy at the possibilities that this magic talisman affords, but also hindering any chance the picture has in building suspense and horrific momentum.

“Advent” is more a puzzle with dire consequences than a vehicle for “GOTCHA” frights and grim and gory deaths. Although it provides a few of those, too, we don’t get scenes that allow us to develop empathy for anyone save for our “crippled” heroine and the “puzzle” is not something the picture provides us with enough information about to “solve” ourselves.

Derouand plays Eva as inexpressive, accepting insults and evidence of the supernatural almost unruffled. But as she starts piecing together this “puzzle,” and recognizes the stakes, the character turns more addled, frazzled and testy, making this gloomy tale of holiday “treats” a treat itself.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Eugénie Derouand, Honorine Magnier, Cyril Garnier, Clément Olivieri, Janis Abrikh, Jérôme Paquatte and Jean-François Garreaud

Credits: Scripted and directed by Patrick Ridremont. A Universal production, a Shudder (Dec. 1) release.

Running time: 1:41

This is Latvia’s selection in the Best International Feature category at the Oscars

It comes our way Dec. 17, via Film Movement.

Yes, the title “My Dad’s Christmas Date” gives away the movie. But who do you think of when you hear this line?

“My Dad spends Monday nights in church.”

How about NOT Jeremy Piven?

The former Cusack sidekick and second act “Entourage” tyro, who has found a third career boost working in Britain, is cast-against-type as a sad widower living in scenic York with his rebellious but “helpful” 16 year-old daughter, played by Brit TV starlet (“Penny on M.A.R.S.”) Olivia-Mai Barrett.

So our search for the rare diamonds among the annual onslaught of “holiday” movie fare has brought us here, to another movie enabled by a grant from the UK’s Hire a Hack Trust, Mick Davis.

I was blissfully unaware of the director Davis ouevre of awful until that steaming pile of “Father Christmas is Back” popped up on my Netflix queue. And here we are again and here I go again — apologies for picking on this poor fellow, but hapless he is and his movies show it.

“My Dad’s Christmas Date” is a downbeat, laugh-free dip into holiday season grief, a movie with a whiff of charm but nary a giggle. It features a couple of jarring, out-of-left-field/out-of-character bursts of rudeness and Piven doing his damnedest to make his pretty but largely inexpressive co-star into Daddy’s Little Darling.

But at least we get a trip to Yorkshire during the holidays in the bargain, so there’s that.

Barrett is Jules, a private school kid who misses her mum, but does this in a most-English way — in private, in secret. Her American Dad David (Piven) only breaks a smile when he imagines his late wife (Megan Brown) is still with them. Because she isn’t.

Whatever Jules is going through — she’s hair-trigger testy with Dad — her BFF at school Emma (Hadar Cats) is more concerned with what’s going on with her “still fit” father.

“So, what are you gonna do about your Dad?”

The plan? Sign him up on matchmaking sites, put him “out there” again. Only Jules doesn’t let her father in on her scheme. Instead, she writes his online dating profile and arranges meet-ups with women posing as her father online. And she’s inviting him with her to museums, receptions, street dances and the like, where “random women” come up and start talking to him like they’re old friends, prospective lovers and what not.

That’s a set-up rich with tried-but-true comic possibilities. A cute moment or two is all it produces, such as the way Jules stage-manages her father’s meet-ups. She’s “washed” all his clothes, save for the outfit she’s picked out for him to wear.

Dad? He’s got one confidante, Sarah, an ex-girlfriend going through a divorce played by Joely Richardson. Their scenes have a comic crackle to them that nothing else in “My Dad’s Christmas Date” can manage.

Sarah is sanguine about the ways of teenage girls. Jules is 16? “At this stage, she’s closer to ‘The Incredible Hulk’ than Bruce Banner.

Jules, meanwhile, is crying by herself and struggling with her first beau. As confidantes go, Emma’s 16 and pretty much useless.

“My Dad’s Christmas Date” spends an inordinate amount of screen time watching Jules apply her perfect makeup and bury her emotions.

Piven struggles to deliver something lighter, and only succeeds a couple of times — once leaping out of character at the sound of a bagpiper, another at a Dickens-themed street dance, where David throws himself into this Fezziwig’s party-scene out of “A Christmas Carol,” clueless about the attractive stranger who thinks she’s there to meet him for a date.

Three screenwriters and a director with a record unblemished by “success” can’t make this “Date” come off. In a movie with plenty of “You Americans” jokes, it’s the Yank who holds his own and the Limeys who let down the side.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, near-profanity

Cast: Jeremy Piven, Olivia-Mai Barrett, Hadar Cats and Joely Richardson.

Credits: Directed by Mick Davis, scripted by Toby Torlesse, Brian Marchetti and Jack Marchetti. An Amazon production, on Netflix.

Running time: 1:31

All most folks remember about Frank Capra’s next-to-last film is Frank Sinatra introducing “High Hopes” in it, sung in a duet with the cinema’s “other” 1950s redheaded little boy, Eddie Hodges.

“High Hopes” won the best original song Oscar, and would go on to become a Sinatra signature tune and John F. Kennedy campaign song. “A Hole in the Head?” Meh.

They weren’t using the term “dramedy” to describe movies and TV shows way back when, and they should have coined it for Capra. But he was far-removed from the holiday-themed humor and emotions that embellished his classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the pathos/comedy balance he achieved with “Meet John Doe” and the wit of “It Happened One Night” and “Mister Deeds Goes to Town.”

“A Hole in the Head” is a drab all-star “comedy” — “color by Deluxe” — a tale of a slow-footed, slightly-fast talking hotelier and hustler trying to hang onto that hotel, and custody of his little boy, while arm-twisting his dull, conservative and wealthier older brother for cash.

Edward G. Robinson plays the brother, Thelma Ritter is his “We’re taking Ally home with us!” wife and Hodges, who originated the role Ron Howard played in “The Music Man” on Broadway, is Ally, the son our widower dotes on, sings with and mock-threatens “I’m gonna FLATTEN you” when they disagree.

Sinatra had no knack for acting with children. None. And Hodges, great in the song and OK elsewhere, never really brings that sparkle that Howard, seven years his junior, delivered on screen practically from birth.

“Hole” is about Tony Manetta’s (Sinatra) desperate efforts to hang on to his Garden of Eden Hotel long enough to “knock it down” and make a Florida “Disneyland” (years before Disney World plans) right there in Miami. But he’s missed some mortgage payments.

His old pal from the Bronx (Keenan Wynn) is rich enough to bail him out. But he’s hard to get ahold of, bouncing hither and yon, staying at the tony Hotel Fontainebleau just down the beach.

That leaves his brother “back home” in the Bronx. But Mario (Robinson) has other plans for his spendthrift, dress-like-a-big-shot, Cadillac convertible-driving “bum” brother. Come back home and take over a five-and-dime, or let us raise the kid.

He and wife Sophie (Ritter) even arrange for Tony to meet “a nice lady,” Mrs. Rogers (Eleanor Parker) to marry and come “home” with. She’s pleasant, conservative and sadly, a sharp contrast to the wild child Tony dates — one of his hotel’s long-term guests, Shirl. Carolyn Jones, destined for small-screen immortality as Morticia in TV’s “Addams Family,” steals the movie with this uninhibited, hotheaded, bongo-playing, surfboard-riding first-gen Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.

“I go where the KICKS are. And when the kicks stop comin’? SHOOooooosh!”

The fading art deco hotel also has a resident lush who staggers in, shouting “GERONIMO!” to one and all, earning an “EXCELSIOR!” from the desk clerk (Dub Taylor), a decade before Stan Lee started saying it. But that’s about all the “local color” “Hole in the Head” manages. “Fawlty Towers” this isn’t.

Robinson has many of what pass for the funniest lines in Arnold Schulman’s script.

“Even when he’s lying, he’s lying,” Mario says of his brother. On hearing one too many “I should drop dead” if I’m lyings from Tony, “If he dropped dead all the times he was supposed to drop dead, I’d go into the cemetery business.”

Sinatra’s Tony, supposedly desperate, never breaks a sweat. That robs the comedy of its ticking-clock urgency. Forty-eight hours before his eviction and Tony lets the ever-dismissed Shirl distract him with a run to the beach for some late night surfing.

The movie’s so overwhelmed with rear-projection driving scenes, so soundstage-bound — even that surfing stop is on a soundstage, with godawful process shots putting Jones on a surfboard — that I figured Sinatra was already in his post-Oscar throw-his-weight-around “I’m not leaving home to make no movie” phase.

But yes, there are exteriors that are unmistakably Miami in the late 1950s…and a couple that are obviously West Coast, with hills in the distance. Florida’s short on hills.

“Hole” is a movie of long monologues, scenes that sadly drag on as first Mrs. Rogers makes a long confession, then Tony forlornly tops it. These are, to a one, a drag.

“High Hopes,” when it pops up and where it pops up, seems shoehorned in — more a contract rider than a scene organically a part of the larger story.

I’ve missed getting around to every Capra picture, despite my best efforts. This one has almost no moments you can describe as “Capraesque.” I think he’s out of his milieu here. He was on much surer ground with the more sentimental curtain call “dramedy,” “Pocketful of Miracles (1961),” which gave us Bette Davis as a bag lady and dressed up Glenn Ford as a dandy of a 1930s gangster.

“A Hole in the Head” is a hole I should have left empty in my Capra collection.

Rating: Approved

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Carolyn Jones, Eleanor Parker, Edward G. Robinson, Thelma Ritter, Dub Taylor, Keenan Wynn and Eddie Hodges

Credits: Directed by Frank Capra, scripted by Arnold Schulman. An MGM release, streaming on Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 2:00

As pandemic break-up romantic comedies go, “The End of Us” isn’t half-bad. It turns out “less is more” in such films, and “End” scores over the big-budget “Locked Down,” the British “Together” and the French Netflixer “Stuck Together” by getting the simple things right.

Chemistry is paramount, and little-known stars Ben Coleman and Ali Vingiano have it, especially in their just-broke-up-and-quarantining-together brittleness.

The situations are simple in the extreme — impatiently seeking match.com matches while still sharing a house with your ex, “dating” during social distancing, quarrels over petty nothings, childish “I’m prepping for the L-SAT. I think I want to be a lawyer” and “I’m finishing my ‘Einstein’ screenplay delusions.

And the conclusion is more logical than satisfying, much like “the end of COVID” which we all looked forward to before certain governors and gubernatorial candidates with dreams of political superstardom made prolonging COVID-19 their brand.

Nick is an LA actor who can’t get busy live-in love Leah to put-aside her brokerage firm’s homework long enough to get her to run lines, undistracted, with him. Put another way, she’s the breadwinner propping up this “leech” who is “still working on himself” into his 30s, a grown-ass man still part-time bartending, still scrambling to find enough acting work to justify his effort.

The first real “joke” here is how self-absorbed (LA draws them like flies) they both are, and how they pretty much miss the coming shutdown/lockdown that is days in the making. She’s puzzled when the parking lot at her office is empty. He’s put-out that his audition is canceled, then his bartending gig is gone.

That’s the perfect time for her to chew him out and for him to storm out. But he can’t. And she’s not shocked to find him back “home,” either. He’s heard of a succession of “immuno-compromised” and the like excuses by phone. She’s getting a lot of cheerleading from friends for kicking him out, stuff of the “FINALLY” and “about damned time” variety.

That’s not the way it actually is. But there’s no taking back what’s already been said, no mending that which is permanently shattered. They’re stuck together, with him annoyingly-playing assorted keyboards and her struggling to hang onto her job and seeking further counsel from friends about this “ex” of four years still living under her roof.

The twists in the story include attempts to date while still trapped with each other, the form such “dates” took under lockdown and the slimmest glimmer of residual feelings emerging within a parade of google searches for “COVID-19 deaths,” Fauci press conferences and — lest we forget — montages of TV coverage of the inept lies, whining, blundering and attempts to cash-in on the crisis by the TPG, the fellow in the White House in America’s darkest hours.

Vingiano does a fine job of suggesting that Leah’s “needs” are battling, hammer and tong, with her sense of pragmatism as she tries to “maintain boundaries” with Nick and take up with an online connection (Derrick Joseph DeBlasis) without Nick finding out about it.

Coleman gets across confusion, hurt and little self-reflection as he brings a little something extra to the proceedings by providing much of the forlorn, pseudo-Parisian score by playing the harmonica-like mouth-blown keyboard called a Melodica.

The arguments are testy, but not nuclear. The “history” is sentimental and palpable, but with no promise of a “future.”

And the production is no more ambitious than working conditions would allow, serving up little reminders of lockdown lunch-dates — car-to-socially-distanced-car — and early COVID paranoia.

Joggers got no peace running down the wrong street. Someone was sure to yell out, “Could you put on a mask, please.”

Someday, we’re going to be nostalgic over all this, as one character suggests. Of all the movies made under COVID conditions and about COVID conditions, I have to say “The End of Us” is the one that hits closest to home.

Rating: R for language and sexual references

Cast: Ben Coleman, Ali Vingiano, Derrick Joseph DeBlasis and Gadiel Del Orbe

Credits: Scripted and directed by Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner. A Saban Films release

Running time: 1:32

It’s a “start civilization over with a (celluloid) film camera” drama story, and it looks lovely.

Dec. 17, “Last Words” earns a limited release.

John Malkovich and Frank Grillo also star in this Jan. 14 release, a tale of a rich guy imprisoned and tortured by a genuine femme fatale, and her henchmen.

He never finished it in his lifetime, but Jonathan Larson’s “Tick, Tick…BOOM” might be the ultimate “Let’s put on a show!” musical. The guy whose grand achievement was “Rent,” the “musical for the MTV generation,” lays bare his struggles to get started, get on his feet and get a show on stage with a years-in-the-making musical he is about to workshop in New York.

If you’re putting that sort of plucky, Broadway Babies Make It Happen production on the screen, you could do worse than having the musical theater Man of the Moment, Lin-Manuel Miranda, directing it to life.

Miranda gives us a revised but affectionate, intimate and respectful adaptation of a stage show about one man’s deadline-obsessed creative process and how impossibly difficult it is to write and mount a musical and launch your career in the priciest, cruelest crucible of them all, The Big Apple.

And Miranda serves up a grand showcase for a singing Andrew Garfield, playing Larson and for rising star Alexandra Shipp, and a pointed reminder of the dazzling talent of Vanessa Hudgens.

It’s about a composer, author and lyricist stressing towards a deadline, struggling to put the finishing touches on the show — about to be “workshopped,” sung-through without sets or a full cast — for potential producers/investors.

He’s upset and frantic about that. But he’s even more freaked out by the fact that all this is coming to a head smack dab on top of his 30th birthday. He’s burned through his youth, his youthful potential and energy waiting on tables at the Moonrise Diner in Soho, living in an unheated flat with a string of indulgent roommates as he takes eight years writing and composing a sci-fi musical called “Superbia.”

I’m…running out of TIME!” he shouts at one point, as if we haven’t gotten the message long before then.

Garfield’s Larson is a Broadway “type,” relentlessly upbeat, a “show must go on” smile as his “public” face, even as the clock is “tick, ticking” away on his dream and the confluence of events piling on top of this one approaching morning in January of 1990.

That’s when his showcase “workshop” will be read/sung-through for a select audience of what he hopes will be Broadway luminaries. The film is framed in Larson singing and narrating from that showcase’s stage, with flashbacks taking us back to much that led up with what’s coming to a head right at that moment.

We meet the dancer girlfriend Susan (Shipp, of “Love, Simon,” “Shaft” and “All the Bright Places”) who is both his muse and about to leave for a job out of town, somebody who needs “an answer,” which is why she’s constantly telling him “We need to talk,” one of a sea of distractions he’s batting away.

“Everyone’s unhappy in New York,” he shouts at Susan, mid-argument. “It’s what New York IS.”

Debtors, an AWOL agent, the producer of the showcase (Jonathan Marc Sherman) and old roommate Michael (Robin de Jesus) are also among those yanking on his sleeve, needing his time.

And he needs a “second act” song for his character Elizabeth. Only he’s “blocked.”

As it’s implied that Michael, a high school classmate and actor who gave up his dream and went corporate, might offer an office job way out and that he might have been Larson’s lover and AIDS is the subtext of anything “Broadway” in 1990, we can see the distractions he faces are close to overwhelming.

He’s manic at times, extravagant — throwing a birthday party for his girlfriend when he can’t afford it, over-doing and over-spending on his workshop presentation. He’ll take “focus group” market research money, and the cash he can round up from selling his record collection, just to add another musician to the workshop band.

He works on that “missing” song, even as he’s having what could be a break-up argument with Susan.

“Scenes from a modern romance, as told in SONG” might work.

As we jump back and forth from Larson singing and telling the story of this showcase, and the tension mounting as he was struggling to keep all his juggled-balls in the air, “tick, tick…Boom!” makes us feel his pain and anxiety, if not share his suspense.

No, nobody ever heard of a Broadway musical called “Superbia” because it never happened. And we all know what’s coming for the whirling dervish of musical energy named Jonathan Larson.

As the show opens with a string of what could be called “affirming” tunes in the power pop modern musical style, it took a while to draw me in.

But Miranda turns the “What am I doing with my life in this diner?” number “Sunday,” a soloist-plus-chorus-piece inspired by Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” into a show stopper. The annoying New York customers in the crowded diner are Broadway royalty who join Jonathan’s vocalized gripes and dreams. Even a casual Broadway fan will recognize Bernadette and Bebe, Chita and Joel Grey. It’s downright thrilling.

Shipp and Hudgens have a lovely duet, “Come to Your Senses,” with “the one who got away” (Shipp’s Susan) and the singer/actress (Hudgens) hired to “sing” her part blended together in Larson’s mind.

Another showpiece is a rap number “Play Game,” about the compromises and demands made on artists just to get their play in front of an audience, knocked out of the park by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter. It’s one of the tunes added to the stage musical, which itself had to be pieced together and finished and made Off Broadway-ready by Tony winning playwright David Auburn (“Proof”) back in 2001.

The funniest scene is the moment Larson treasured forever, a hilarious “public reading” endorsement by Stephen Sondheim himself (Bradley Whitford), batting away shallow complaints from a never-humbled blowhard of a Broadway colleague (Richard Kind, always good for a laugh).

Miranda keeps all this engaging, even if becomes difficult to keep all of it straight in your head. Garfield lets us see a man keeping “overwhelmed” at bay. But it’s difficult for the audience to share his (relative) calm.

The songs range from beautiful and fun, to generic and forgettable filler, tunes serving their purpose in the narrative, but little more.

There’s no getting around the places all these stresses, characters and juggled balls can make the show drag, here and there.

But “Tick, Tick…Boom!” is still essential viewing for “Rent” fans and devotees of Larson’s legend, and an impressive audition for more musicals from the likes of Garfield, Hudgens and Shipp. And Miranda fans? He did a much better job than the crew that filmed “Rent.”

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, some suggestive material and drug references

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesus, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Bradley Whitford, Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, Richard Kind, Judith Light and Vanessa Hudgens

Credits: Directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, based on the musical by Jonathan Larson and Steven Auburn, adapted for the screen by Steven Levenson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

He’d done a lot of TV and bit parts in movies, mostly, before Clifton Collins Jr. first popped into the public consciousness with a gripping turn as one of the murders in “Capote.”

I interviewed him back then and he became one of those character actors I sat up and noticed, every time out, in the decades that followed. “Sunshine Cleaning,” “Veronica Mars,” “The Mule” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” are among his best known credits.

Hey, if Clint AND Quentin pick up on your genius, you know you’re special.

This Dec. 29 (limited) release gives Collins the rare chance to hold the spotlight, playing an aging, injured jockey looking for one last shot.