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Rent Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for mature thematic material involving drugs and sexuality, and for some strong language) Genre: Musical Theater release: August 26, 2011 by Sony Directed by: Chris Columbus Runtime: 2 hours 15 minutes Cast: Rosario Dawson (Mimi Marquez), Taye Diggs (Benjamin "Benny" Coffin III), Wilson Jermaine Heredia (Angel Schunard), Jesse L. Martin (Tom Collins), Idina Menzel (Maureen Johnson), Adam Pascal (Roger Davis), Anthony Rapp (Mark Cohen), Tracie Thoms (Joanne Jefferson) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Inspired by Puccini's opera La Boheme, Rent trades Paris' Latin Quarter of the early 19th century for New York's East Village of the late 20th century, and tells the story of one year in the life of a group of artists struggling to live and love in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, drugs, and homelessness.

Adam Pascal as Roger, who's recovering from his girlfriend's suicide

Mark (Anthony Rapp) is the narrator, a guerilla filmmaker who lives in a rundown building in an area of the city known as Alphabet City. He pines for Maureen (Idina Menzel), a performance artist with an appreciation for all kinds of drama, who recently left him for a lawyer named Joanne (Tracie Thoms). Mark's roommate is Roger (Adam Pascal), a melancholy musician who can't manage to write a song. He's being wooed by a stripper, Mimi (Rosario Dawson), who lives downstairs, but remains emotionally unavailable to her and to his friends.

Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) and Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) round out the core group of friends as the gay lovers who meet each other a few minutes after Tom, a computer whiz, is beaten up. Angel, a flamboyant drag queen street musician alternately referred to as "he" and "she," tends his wounds, and sparks fly.

Maureen (Idina Menzel) dances up a storm

Together they sing their way from an eviction notice—issued by a former roommate, Benny (Taye Diggs), who married the landlord's daughter and has crossed over to the corporate dark side—to a street protest to an engagement dinner to a funeral. There's very little dialogue that doesn't have a melody, and the movie's exuberant musical performances trip along without much breathing room in which to develop strong attachments to the characters. We're dropped into the lives of these people and it's assumed we care. Some moviegoers will. Some moviegoers won't.

Rent is one of Broadway's longest-running hits, and its move to the big screen is likely to please "Rentheads"—many of whom attended the screening I was at and sang along during the musical numbers. Diggs, Heredia, Martin, Menzel, Pascal, and Rapp were all original cast members ten years ago, and reprise their roles here. Newcomers Rosario Dawson and Joanne Jefferson—along with Menzel, Martin, and Heredia—all give standout performances.

Anthony Rapp plays Roger's roommate Mark

But those without an attachment to the story or a natural affinity for bucking the system on principle alone might find themselves scratching their heads. What is it that these people want exactly? To not ever have to pay rent? Or a restaurant tab? For all their moaning about "the man" and the injustice of modern life, none of the characters seems to be doing much about it on a personal level. Maureen's much hyped protest against an eviction of the homeless seems to be more about raising her own profile than that of the poor. And when Mark pulls out a camera to catch a couple police officers harassing a homeless woman, the woman calls his bluff by asking him to pony up a couple bucks to really help her out.

What the characters in Rent do clearly want is love. They're looking for the shelter another person can provide in a stormy world. And all of the couples take their turns in the limelight, figuring out how to love one another well. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed, but they pursue and cling to each other (friends and lovers alike) with an admirable sense of urgency that's punctuated by the daily AZT doses many of them take. Rent is one of the few movies in which being HIV-positive is a viable pick-up line. These friends live by the motto "no day but today" because AIDS might take their lives, of the life of someone they love, tomorrow.

Mimi (Rosario Dawson) puts some moves on Roger

But for all the big themes Rent deals with—love, death, injustice, community—it still seems a bit superficial. The dirty city streets are just a bit too tidy. The pain is just a bit too sanitized. The hair is just a bit too perfect. And it probably doesn't help that people are singing all the time. There's an energy in live theater, a give and take between the performers and the audience, a certain vulnerability, that can make musicals electric. Rent is a fan favorite on the stage for good reason. And musicals can also work on film. (See Chicago as only the most recent example.) But on the screen musicals are more prone than most genres to seem cheesy, and this adaptation verges on Gouda. Whether moviegoers will break out the crackers remains to be seen.

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