Lynn-Manuel Miranda for "dirty secrets" on Tick, Tick Boom!

For his directorial debut, Hamilton creator Lynn Manuel Miranda turns to an unusual source of material - the late Jonathan Larson's unfinished one-person show.

As the composer and lyricist of the groundbreaking musical Rent from the 1990s, Larson is a force of nature. Tall, weak, with messy black hair and ambition to burn.

"He wrote for eight hours almost every day," his friend Victoria Leacock once recalled. "He refuses to write jingles for companies whose policies or ethics he doesn't agree with or accept money to work for such companies. So instead, he chooses to wait for a table."

And he did for ten years, eroding the barren West Soho life as he dreamed of becoming a Broadway composer.

When the time finally came, it couldn't have been bigger. Called the "Rock Opera of the Nineties," Rent won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Musical and eventually became the eleventh longest-running show in Broadway history.

But Larson never saw him. He died of an aortic aneurysm this morning of the Off-Broadway show preview in January 1996, only 35 years old. He left nothing but the unproduced sci-fi musical Superbia and Boho Days's one-person show for his failure to make Superbia.

After his death, this rock monologue was turned into a drama with three actors titled Tick, Tick ... Boom! Jonathan Larson dies on the day of Rent off-Broadway premiere. In 2001 the young composer saw Tick, Tick ... Boom! in a small hotel theater in New York, and it changed his life.

"Explain whether I wanted to do this for a living or not," he later recalled, adding, "It was like, 'This is what your 20s look like, man.'

When Netflix asked him to adapt the musical for the big screen, he took the opportunity. "It was the fastest email reply, 'I'm the only person who can direct this film. So if they let me do that, it will," he said at the film's premiere earlier this month.

Rarely is there a more fitting marriage between director and material? Miranda and Larson's careers have run parallel to the Pulitzer Awards, and they share the same restless and nervous energy.

Miranda even played Larson in the 2014 revival of Tick, Tick... Boom! The New York Times noted that his appearance "throbs with a deep sense of identification." As expected, the film is then a subtle portrayal of a lead artist, full of Broadway historical tropes and Bradley Whitford's cameo as Stephen Sondheim gleaming.