A troupe of failures for sale -- or, ‘Rent’

HOW to put this. “Rent” is a Chris Columbus adaptation of a smash-hit Broadway musical about artistic integrity, counterculture, political activism and squatters’ rights that may have been the most successful moneymaking venture ever staked on selling the idea that “selling out” is bad.

(Two tickets for an 8 p.m. Friday show at the Nederlander Theater in New York, up to $295 apiece. The chance to tap your Ferragamo-shod toe to lyrics like “No pension ... hating convention ... hating pretension ... riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits?” Priceless.)

It’s hard to put the experience of watching “Rent” into words, especially after “Team America: World Police” said everything there was to say about the play with puppets, and so succinctly. (“Everyone has AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS! Everyone has AIDS!”)

But I’ll try.

“Rent” is commodified faux bohemia on a platter, eliciting the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children’s beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots, Mahatma Gandhi in Apple ads. It’s about art, activism and counterculture in the same way that a poster of a kitten hanging from a tree branch (“Hang in There!”) is about commitment and heroic perseverance. It represents everything the people it pretends to stand for hate. And it doesn’t even know it. Watching it feels sort of like watching “Touched by an Angel” with your grandmother and realizing that although you’re clearly looking at the same thing, you’re seeing something entirely different. It’s awkward to behold.

The movie begins on a stage, with all of the characters lined up singing “Seasons of Love.” The theater setting is the movie’s single reference to its origins, but though the characters soon leave the stage for good, the movie never really does. Compared to a masterpiece of the genre such as “Cabaret,” “Rent” seems to find its new status as a film more embarrassing than liberating, and it clings to its own theatricality for dear life, as though it were Blanche DuBois and someone had just flipped on the lights.

It’s Dec. 24, 1989, and Mark Cohen (Anthony Rapp), an earnest filmmaker with a Bolex camera strapped to his handlebars, rides through the streets of Lower Manhattan, earnestly photographing homeless people and singing.

Returning home to his Alphabet City loft, he finds his heat and electricity have been turned off. His roommate, Roger (Adam Pascal), a musician, informs him that they’ve received an eviction notice from their former friend, roommate and fellow artist Benny (Taye Diggs), who has married up, up and away to the landlord’s daughter.

Meanwhile, their friend Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), a philosophy professor who just got fired from MIT for his “theory of actual reality,” is mugged in an alley, where he’s rescued by a loving drag queen named Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia); and a heroin-addicted exotic dancer named Mimi Marquez (Rosario Dawson) swoons over her upstairs neighbor Roger, who assiduously ignores her. Wouldn’t you know it -- everyone has AIDS. Roger, Mimi, Angel and Tom do, anyway. The rest of the gang is merely broke and dysfunctional.

Soon, Benny shows up, offering to reinstate rent-free living if Mark and Roger help stop a protest, planned by Mark’s ex-girlfriend Maureen (Idina Menzel). This would pave the way for his new “state of the art virtual digital interactive studio.” Maureen, a narcissistic performance artist, has recently left Mark for a lawyer named Joanne (Tracie Thoms), but Mark and Roger would rather starve, freeze and sing about it than lift one finger toward the neighborhood’s gentrification.

Not that you blame them. Or you wouldn’t, if the movie didn’t make it so hard not to roll your eyes every five minutes. For all its passionate defense of bohemian living (“Rent” is cribbed from Puccini’s “La Boheme”), much of it delivered from atop a table at a local restaurant where the bourgeoisie stick around to be dutifully epate, the movie’s supposed admiration for the lives of noncommercial artists doesn’t touch its withering disdain for their work.

How is anyone supposed to get behind a guy whose “films” are just home movies of the homeless and his soon-to-be homeless friends? (In one scene, a homeless woman begins to call him on it, but ends up just deriding him for being poor. “Hey, artist, do you have a dollar? I didn’t think so.” Oh, snap.) Or behind a blocked songwriter who spends an entire year agonizing over a song that turns out to be a bunch of moldy cliches set to power chords? Or a performance artist whose “multimedia protest” would make Laurie Anderson’s eyes bleed? Only the fashion-obsessed drag queen and the uptight lawyer avoid the lethal combination of pretension, sentimentality, self-congratulation and posturing that more or less characterizes their friends’ work -- hey, everybody needs fashion and laws.

Well, so what. “Rent” isn’t about work, anyway. It’s about love and death on the Lower East Side, before it became the kind of place where people would pay lots of money to see “Rent.” While Angel and Tom get the issue of T-cell counts out of the way in the first few minutes, it takes Roger much longer to spill the beans to Mimi. (“You tooo?” “Me tooo.”)

After the flurry of the initial couplings -- Tom and Angel, Mimi and Roger, Maureen and Joanne, Mark and his artistic integrity -- things start to come apart. Mimi can’t stay off the smack, so Roger walks away. Maureen can’t stop chasing girls, so Joanne gives up. Mark gets approached by a show called “Buzzline,” which loves his “hip ‘n’ edgy” footage of the protest and ensuing police riot, so he sells out. (It says something, though I’m not sure what, exactly, that Sarah Silverman, in a brief appearance as the slick TV executive who happily purchases Mark’s hip ‘n’ edginess for $3,000, comes across as the only believable character in the film -- she’s so fake, she’s real.)

The most amazing thing about “Rent” (and be sure to look for that adjective on a movie poster near you, with an exclamation point attached) is how painfully dated and achingly false the movie feels, when its central concerns are real and more relevant than ever. How is that possible? Because to scratch “Rent’s” Gap fashion grunge-wear surface is to hit a mother lode of disconnect and contempt for the very things it has co-opted.

Is it fair, or even seemly, to expect even a modicum of authenticity or cool from a Hollywood adaptation of a Broadway musical? Probably not. But this constant corporate exhumation and trotting around of counterculture’s corpse -- it’s not fun anymore.

You know what would be fun? If Columbus had turned the story inside out and made the rapacious developers and marauding executives the heroes of the story. Why not? To the victor goes the official version, etc. At least that might have rung true.

Plus, I have a great title for it. They could have called it “Own.”

*

‘Rent’

MPAA rating: PG-13

Times guidelines: Contains scenes of intravenous drug use and explicit song lyrics

A Columbia Pictures release of a Revolution Studios presentation. Directed by Chris Columbus. Book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson. Screenplay by Stephen Chbosky. Produced by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, Chris Columbus, Mark Radcliffe, Michael Barnathan. Choreography by Keith Young. Director of photography Stephen Goldblatt. Edited by Richard Pearson. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

In general release.