Rent is one of the longest running, most highly acclaimed musicals of all time. With a Pulitzer, a gaggle of Drama Desk and Tony awards, and an original cast that it rocketed to stardom, the show about a group of impoverished New York artists trying to just make it in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic is legendary. Tragically, its creator Jonathan Larson died before it was ever staged. A new film adaptation by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Dear Evan Hansen writer Steven Levenson of Tick, Tick...Boom!—a semi-autobiographical musical Larson penned before Rent—tells his story.

The movie, already in theaters and now on Netflix, follows playwright Jonathan Larson (played by Andrew Garfield) in the months leading up to his 30th birthday in 1990. He's waiting for his career in the arts to take off while working at the Moondance Diner in Soho to make ends meet. As he wrestles with conflict in his love life and confronts his best friend’s AIDS diagnosis, Larson is working against the clock ticking in his mind to stage his musical Superbia.

Jonathan Larson, who grew up in White Plains, NY, moved to Manhattan to pursue his theater dreams and really did work on Soho’s Moondance Diner—famously featured in 2002’s Spider Man, Friends, Sex and the City, and now Tick, Tick...Boom!. As it does in the film, Larson’s musical Superbia did preview at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Ira Weitzman in 1990. But no one wanted to produce the play and in his disappointment that followed, he wrote Tick, Tick...Boom!, which he finished in 1991, and performed as a solo act at the Village Gate, the Second Stage Theater, and at the New York Theatre Workshop through 1993.

Larson began writing another musical called Rent in 1990. The first staged reading of the show took place in 1993, and the first staged production at the New York Theatre Workshop in 1996. Cast in the production at that time were unknown actors Idina Menzel, Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, and Taye Diggs.

On January 21, 1996, during the final week of rehearsals for the production, Larson collapsed in the theater after he was struck by intense chest pains. He went to the hospital and was diagnosed with food poisoning; his EKG readings and X-rays had come back as normal. The doctors pumped Larson’s stomach, prescribed him a powerful painkiller, and sent him home. Three days later, on the evening of January 24, Larson was to watch the final dress rehearsal of Rent and to be interviewed by New York Times afterwards. After the rehearsal, PEOPLE reported in 1997, Larson met with Times reporter Anthony Tommasini and told him: “I think I may have a life as a composer.”

In the early hours of the following morning, Larson’s roommate came home to find his lifeless body on their kitchen floor. An autopsy later revealed an aortic dissection—a tear in the artery that carries blood from the heart. It was believed to have been caused by undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, a genetic condition that affects connective tissue. Larson was 35 years old.

The first performance of Jonathan Larson’s magnum opus Rent was held later that night. With his parents in the audience, the performance began as an intimate reading and sing-through, and by the end, was a fully staged show. That performance, and every one for the decades to follow, was dedicated to Jonathan Larson.

A few months later, on April 29, Rent opened on Broadway. It won the Tony for best musical that year, and Larson was posthumously awarded two Tonys for best book and best score, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Rent ran for twelve years on Broadway, giving 5123 performances before it closed on September 7, 2008. It was also adapted into a 2005 film by Chris Columbus.

After Larson's death, playwright David Auburn adapted Tick, Tick... Boom! into a three-actor piece—parts of which are staged with Andrew Garfield, Vanessa Hudgens, and Joshua Henry in the new film. In 2014, at the City Center's Encores! Off-Center Theater in New York, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself played Jonathan in Tick, Tick... Boom!. Though the new film adaptation is Miranda’s directorial debut, he told the L.A. Times that Tick, Tick... Boom! was “the only film he already knew how to make.” Miranda saw the production staged while he was in college, and the show convinced him that he should pursue his theater dreams professionally.

“He could be a real pain in the ass because he was impatient and frustrated,” Miranda told the L.A. Times of his idol, Larson. “But when he was teaching songs to actors and rehearsing and performing, it was like seeing a fish go back into the water, because he was doing what he was put on this earth to do. I understand that. I’m lucky enough to get to do this for a living, but I know I’d be writing songs no matter what, because it’s my calling.”

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