Let’s just say that Larson is hardly sympathetic. And that’s subsequently portrayed via flashback. He’s there with a band, Roger (Joshua Henry), and Karessa (Vanessa Hudgens), jokingly and passionately relaying his memories (and fictionalizations) of the time everything went wrong. Add one more layer (perhaps unnecessarily) and you get Larson’s (Andrew Garfield) girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) introducing him onstage at a piano via narration. Miranda and Levenson take the latter conceit and go backwards with their film to deliver dramatic reenactments of the events documented by the songs. What started as an autobiographical one-man show would ultimately be expanded by David Auburn into a three-piece performance. This is the journey from point A to B with a lot of tragedy, heartache, and waning hope along the way. And, from the looks of it, one could say it never would have happened without that spectacular failure. His first Broadway show (where “Rent” would soon go) earned wide acclaim and a cinematic adaptation of its own, but it’s good for young artists coming up to realize it wasn’t the first thing he wrote. An aneurism would kill him the morning of his first Off-Broadway preview, so the Tony awards and Pulitzer would be received by loved ones posthumously instead. No, Larson wouldn’t hit the big time until “Rent” and he’d never hit it again. Not even for the musical tick, tick … Boom! (as directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda and adapted by Steven Levenson) is based on. That doesn’t, however, mean you shouldn’t dream or that your first try won’t get funded. And any creator who isn’t made aware of this fact in school has been done a disservice by their educators. As the relatable cartoon shared by artists all over the internet of an iceberg attests: the amount of work produced to get to the one piece that finds an audience (in any medium) is too high a multiplier to even begin hypothesizing. Despite any prescience on behalf of its subject matter, I’m sure even the playwright himself, Jonathan Larson, would have looked back on his big-budget, science fiction Broadway hopeful “Superbia” with enough hindsight to acknowledge there was no way it would ever see the light of day.