PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/22/05)

Click here to check out our EXCLUSIVE video coverage of the RENT movie premiere.

Jonathan Larson's Rent may not have had the answer for AIDS, but it certainly offered the cure for the common musical. Transposing La Bohème's death-by-consumption tragedy to New York's equally bohemian East Village, Larson set his angst-driven opus to a contemporary rock score. Rent was a young person's musical, combining a liberal acceptance of drug addicts and deviants with the kind of new-fangled music that sent the blue-haired Broadway crowd reaching for earplugs.

The show's politics may have been mushy (with "love" repeatedly offered as the solution for AIDS), but it made a strong case for tolerance. Angels in America and The Normal Heart – these were landmark plays about the AIDS epidemic. Rent, meanwhile, was the cri de coeur of young lives cut short, made all the more poignant by the fact that its creator, Larson, died unexpectedly the night of the show's first and only dress rehearsal.

For those with a low threshold for the musical stylings of Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber, there was something instantly liberating about the sound of an electric guitar rattling the alabaster fixtures of an old Broadway theater. Unfortunately, the effect isn't quite so revolutionary on screen. Audiences have come to expect loud music with their movies, and as forcefully upbeat as Larson's best material is, it takes on a tame, adult contemporary feel on film.

The solution would have been to reintroduce Larson's rebel spirit through the direction (the show even supplies the mechanism to do so by setting up Mark as an aspiring filmmaker who chronicles everything on his 16mm camera). Rather than framing Rent through the lens of Mark's camera, director Chris Columbus gives everything the royal Hollywood treatment (an ironic twist considering how preoccupied the characters are about not selling out to the Man).

Columbus is respectful where Rent could've used someone risky, sacrificing the scrappy irreverence that's crucial to the show's tone. Galvanized by the "importance" of the material, he's hopelessly literal in translating Larson's work to screen (right down to shooting the opening number on a stage). He's even gone as far as to invite six of the eight original leads back to reprise their roles for the movie (which means the twentysomething starving-artist characters are now old enough that they should just quit their whining and get jobs already). For fans, the upshot is a fresh new soundtrack that improves upon the hastily produced original Broadway cast recording with robust, full-spirited renditions of all the key songs. The downside: There's now a Godzilla-movie disconnect between lip movement and lyrics whenever anyone sings.

Considering how much new additions Rosario Dawson (as Mimi) and Tracie Thoms (as Joanne) bring to the film, it's a shame Columbus didn't introduce more changes. As adaptations go, this one is every bit as slavish to its source material as Columbus' wooden Harry Potter installments, but misses the point entirely. Rent the movie has become a monument not to a generation of young people devastated by AIDS, but to Rent the musical, and as such, it arrives nearly 5,256,000 minutes too late.—Peter Debruge