I first saw the Broadway version of Rent approximately 4,968,000 minutes before I saw this film adaptation, and a few peculiar things have changed in the interim. The scruffy squatters I recalled have been replaced by thirtysomething bums, the geography of New York has mutated (love that subway that dumps you at Tompkins Square Park!) and Thelma & Louise—referenced in the original lyrics—has apparently actually been retro-released prior to 1989, the year in which this movie is set.

I could easily have hated the movie for these shortcomings, but I didn’t.

The late Jonathan Larson’s ambitious stage musical is an inferior but ultimately satisfying take on Puccini’s "La Bohème" and Chris Columbus’s somewhat less ambitious movie musical Rent is an inferior but ultimately satisfying take on its precursor. Rent's core artistic statement is losing luster with each generation, but there is still plenty to recommend it.

The story follows the plight of several outsider bohemians struggling to maintain their hand-to-mouth existences in Manhattan’s East Village against a threatened corporate development led by an ex-friend, the uncaring authorities, the relentless progress of the HIV that infects some of their ranks and against the inevitability of, well, the monthly rent.



The cast is as close to original as any Broadway musical that’s ever been filmed, including Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal as roomies Mark and Roger, Jesse L. Martin of subsequent "Law & Order" fame as college professor Collins, Tony Award winner Wilson Jermaine Heredia as drag queen Angel, Idina Menzel as siren Maureen and Taye Diggs as nasty yuppie Bennie. Joining the ensemble are Rosario Dawson as stripper with a heart of gold Mimi (she replaces the irreplaceable—but pregnant—Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Tracie Thorns as Maureen’s new girlfriend Joanne (she takes over for Fredi Walker, who was deemed too old).

Presuming you can stand sung-through musicals, there is much to appreciate in Rent. For starters, all of the actors approach their roles with total conviction, completely selling you on the melodrama and mush that simmers in every song. Their voices are superb and their acting transcendent. Stand-outs? Dawson makes Mimi her own, erasing bad memories of her amateurish turn in Alexander. Mimi projects a coquettish desperation that easily has her audience—and the lovestruck Roger—on a leash. Anthony Rapp’s Mark is the perfect guide, fun and funny and so eager to do right—you’d never guess Rapp has performed this role thousands of times. And Tracie Thorns, as an African-American princess used to getting her way (but who can’t control the feisty Maureen), has a soft touch that makes hers, among all the stage actors around her, the performance that sits most comfortably on the big screen.

Martin is perhaps too groomed and too enthusiastic to register the sufficient raffish charm his Collins should have and Menzel, so brilliant the first time around as well as in the more recent smash-hit Broadway show "Wicked", is just too old and her features too quirky to fully convince as a girl who everyone finds bewitching. Heredia is sweet and compelling in his spoken-word scenes, but oddly remote when singing, a shadow of the fiery presence he brought to Broadway back in the day.

The chief flaws in the film are choices made by Columbus, including the movie’s low-Rent sets, non-existent lighting (dark does not equal artsy) and occasional sitcomish tone. When the audience is overly delighted by an unexpected cameo from Sarah Silverman, you’re doing something wrong. The material is there, but a pervasive feeling hovers: Everything could have been better if only the director of Mrs. Doubtfire hadn’t been involved.

As easy as it is to quibble with imperfections, it’s still hard to write Rent off. What forces one to give Rent its due is its powerful collection of memorable tunes, songs that even if they’re slightly corny to some ears are full of passion and hope and idealistic challenges to the status quo. “Seasons of Love,” with its immortal “525,600 minutes” calculation, opens the film and despite being sung by the players to an empty theater (a high concept with no pay-off) it soars, like all the songs that follow, propelling the story from scene to scene. “Light My Candle” might look a bit silly up close and personal, with its intentional extinguishing of flames as a means of flirtation, but close your eyes and it even surpasses the original cast recording. “La Vie Bohème” is a slam-bang production number that threatens to eclipse everything around it.

In short, even though some of the scenes don’t translate well to this medium, all of the music does.

The subject matter is endlessly depressing but the execution is soaked in cock-eyed optimism, ensuring that true bohemians will role their eyes at the Hollywoodization of something edgy. But if there is any good reason why mainstream movie-goers humming along to a musical that features two same-sex couples, a drag queen and a one to one HIV+/HIV- ratio is a bad thing, I haven’t found it.