Taking a page from Puccini’s La Boheme, Rent’s ragtag East Village ensemble includes loft squatters and roommates Mark (Anthony Rapp) and Roger (Adam Pascal), the former a frustrated filmmaker and the latter an HIV-afflicted former "pretty boy front man," now struggling to create one memorable song before his life ends. Into this mix comes upstairs neighbor and exotic dancer Mimi (Rosario Dawson), a smack addict who’s also got HIV and the hots for Roger, Mark’s ex Maureen (the fantastic Idina Menzel), a flamboyant performance artist with a roving eye and a new girlfriend, conservative attorney, Joanne (Tracie Thoms). Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) is a street musician/drag queen with AIDS who begins a tender love affair with Collins (Jesse L. Martin), past roommate of Mark and Roger. Benny (Taye Diggs), a former friend who has sold out to corporate America now owns the loft and adjacent lot, and wants them out—a symbol of a capitalist pig they despise.

Rent has always been an outside-the-mainstream show that positions itself cleverly within the mainstream. And the film, while rated PG-13, is clearly meant to appeal to a youthful audience with its themes of individuality, young, artistic idealism, and angst-mixed timely issues like AIDS and drug abuse, launched with the live life to the fullest "no day but today" coda. But if there was ever a show that should be adapted as an R-rated film, it was this one. Though the themes of the play haven’t been softened one bit, it could have gone even further in its depiction of the crushing disease and might have been able to say more about its sexually liberated band of urban saints.

One wishes that Columbus had darkened the material’s already dark elements, particularly Mimi’s descent into addiction and disease, a heartbreaking arc that Dawson is more than up for. "Goodbye Love," a wrenching song from the play that was shot and edited out of the film at the last moment, chronicles this fall as well as a searing battle of priorities between Roger and Mark. It’s a small bit, about three and a half minutes, but it’s critical to the show and should turn up on the DVD when released.

The two new cast additions are a mixed bag, with a great looking and physically impressive Rosario Dawson clearly up to the emotional challenge of playing the pole-dancing, afflicted Mimi, and for the most part, very capably carrying a tune. However, raspy original and too pregnant to play the part Daphne Rubin-Vega got the through-the-roof rock star turn with a bit more verve, and Dawson in comparison sounds a bit, well, flat during the more challenging moments of "Out Tonight," Mimi’s signature number of pent-up nocturnal wanderlust released. But Tracie Thoms, replacing the deemed too-old original cast member Fredi Walker, is a revelation, offering a sexy, smart and spunky take on lesbian attorney Joanne, fabulous in her rendition of "Take Me or Leave Me" with Menzel.

What emerges here ultimately is a pretty spectacular movie that’s packed with a wallop of emotion from an extraordinarily talented young cast. Rent has always been the anti-Broadway musical, a bohemian rock-opera concerned with shaking you up socially and emotionally with great rock songs and a genuine love for the essence of living without regret, no day but today. It’s a lovely film that speaks directly to the heart.