Most of the original cast members have made it back for the movie, which was filmed on location in New York. Rosario Dawson fills in for the feral Daphne Rubin-Vega and Tracie Thoms for soulful Fredi Walker. Everybody belts his and her little heart out. But they're all so poorly lit in some numbers we can barely see them. Yes, ''Rent" is about penniless artists who can't afford to eat or pay their electric bills. But must their straits extend to the threadbare filmmaking, too?
Larson, who died before the show opened on Broadway in 1996, fashioned ''Rent" as a contemporary version of Puccini's ''La Bohème." Like the show, the movie's plot is told in strands that are occasionally woven into production numbers. While the play didn't specify a year, the movie sets the material in the late 1980s. And a lot of the dialogue originally sung is now spoken on-screen -- sometimes, unfortunately, in rhyme.
Holding the story lines together are Mark (Anthony Rapp) and Roger (Adam Pascal), roommates in an illegal industrial loft. One's a filmmaker, the other an ex-junkie rock songwriter. Their professor friend, Collins (Jesse L. Martin), gets mugged and is rescued by Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a benevolent drag queen. They both happen to be HIV-positive and fall in love.
Mimi (Dawson) is the stripper junkie who lives downstairs from Roger. They fall in love, too. Also in love are Mark's ex, Maureen (Idina Menzel), and Joanne (Thoms). The whole crew is united against Bennie (Taye Diggs). He used to be a hipster but now is a suit who wants to raze a tent city to build a production studio.
People bicker, they dance, they die.
The movie gets off to an inauspiciously sluggish start when the eight main cast members belt the show's signature tune, ''Seasons of Love," on a set-less stage in front of an empty house. They're giving it their all, grooving and wailing to no one in particular: Hey, we're over here! And it's 1989 -- Simon Cowell hasn't been invented yet.
