The story revolves around seven young people living in Greenwich Village: Mark (Anthony Rapp), a struggling filmmaker; his roommate Roger (Adam Pascal), a musician with AIDS; Mimi (Rosario Dawson), a heroin addict and exotic dancer, who also has AIDS; the on-again, off-again lesbian couple Joanne (Tracie Thoms) and Maureen (Idina Menzel); and gypsy scholar Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) and his drag-queen boyfriend Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), both of whom have AIDS.

Most of the roles are filled by members of the original off-Broadway cast. While purists might applaud this move, the truth is that these actors are in their mid-30s and are simply too old to play earnest young bohemians. Furthermore, not all of them transition well to the big screen. Pascal is particularly flat, never convincing us that his Roger loves Mimi or has existential despair or possesses one iota of creative genius. (And it doesn’t help matters that he’s saddled with a hideous feathered haircut even Bon Jovi would have deemed too 80’s.) Idina Menzel, on the other hand, is charismatic, goofy, and full of energy—a commodity this RENT could use a whole lot more of. And Martin both sings and moves with a relaxed, fluid grace.

As for the newcomers, Rosario Dawson, despite her limited singing range, sparkles as Mimi, but Tracie Thoms’s Joanne is mealy-mouthed and spends the entire film acting irritated.

And yet, despite its casting problems, RENT might still have succeeded had Chris Columbus any idea what to do with a musical. I regret to say, he doesn’t. Many of the musical numbers seem oddly forced, due in large part to Columbus’s awkward cinema verite touches. Much of the film is shot on location in New York City. There’s graffiti on the buildings and snow on the ground, and, in one scene, it’s cold enough outside that vapor comes out of the actors’ mouths. The sets are likewise convincing: the loft Mark and Roger inhabit is cluttered with papers, empty food containers, and rummage-sale-grade furniture. But this realistic backdrop only makes it seem weird when the characters suddenly burst into song.

The original musical, ironically, was set on a nearly bare stage, and tables, folding chairs, and scaffolding stood in for the characters’ living spaces. The stripped-down “scenery” forced the audience to pay close attention to the lyrics and the acting for cues as to where the characters were. Song alone filled up the stage. But Columbus doesn’t seem to trust his audience to have an attention span more than thirty seconds long. When characters sing, he fills up the screen with action, flashbacks, and wretchedly-choreographed dance numbers. With the exception of Martin, no one in the cast is much of a dancer (RENT was never a dance-based musical), and they execute their steps with the cautious precision of amateurs. Anthony Rapp appears to have been allowed to come up with his own moves, but his dorky dancing is either so-bad-it’s-good or jaw-droppingly awful, depending on your point of view.

A couple of the numbers do manage to catch fire. In one, Collins and Angel dance down a city street, singing the buoyant love duet “I’ll Cover You.” In another, “Santa Fe,” the guys in the cast fantasize about chucking their bohemian lives and starting a restaurant in Santa Fe. It’s shot entirely in a subway car, and the other patrons react with believable bemusement or annoyance as he dances sinuously around the poles, singing lyrics that any graduate student can identify with:

Well, I’m thwarted by a metaphysic puzzle
And I’m sick of grading papers, that I know.
I’m shouting in my sleep; I need a muzzle.
And all this misery pays no salary, so . . .
Let’s open up a restaurant in Santa Fe
Our labors would reap financial gains
We’ll open up a restaurant in Santa Fe
And save from devastation our brains.

But such moments are rare, and, despite its edgy subject matter, this version of RENT seems strangely sanitized. Much of this has to do with the timing: AIDS is no longer the hot-button topic it once was, and pop-culture phenomena like Will and Grace have made audiences more comfortable with homosexuality. But the filmmakers must also be held accountable. The images of gay couples they present are heavily edited. They show Collins and Angel cutely skipping alongside Central Park, but cut “Contact,” a racy number which leaves no doubt that all the couples in the play are sexually active. Joanne and Maureen get to fool around a bit more, but Thoms and Menzel have little chemistry, and so most of their embraces seem forced.

Likewise, AIDS itself is reduced to a mere plot device in the movie. It’s not AIDS but AIDS-lite these characters have, a Love Story version of AIDS which makes for many weepy bedside scenes but little real anguish.

With AIDS and homosexuality defanged, most of the plot tension must come from Benny (Taye Diggs), a bohemian-turned-yuppie who wants to turn Mark and Roger’s building into (gasp!) condos and a “cyberarts” studio. The problem is that the Benny-vs.-the-bohos subplot was always one of the weakest in RENT. Benny’s father-in-law owns Mark and Roger’s loft. They are jobless and haven’t paid their rent in a year, and yet the musical consistently wants us to root for the starving artists and hiss every time Benny appears on stage, as though he were some mustache-twirling villain out of Victorian melodrama (“We can’t pay the rent! We can’t pay the rent!” “You must pay the rent! You must pay the rent!”). In Columbus’s incapable hands, this plot thread grows even more shameless. He cuts the scenes and lyrics that humanize Benny, turning the character into little more than yuppiedom personified (“Hey! Get your a-- off my Range Rover!” he yells at a homeless man at one point).

Furthermore, even the characters of the leads themselves are weakened by the filmmakers’ unwise choice to delete certain songs. Originally, the entire first act of the musical was set on Christmas Eve. In the movie, this action is stretched out over several days, a change that makes the plot more realistic but which forces the deletion of songs that make too much reference to “that one magic night.” An especial loss is Mark’s number “Halloween,” a song in which he wonders whether seeing things from behind the lens of a camera is keeping him from connecting with others.

In the transition from stage to screen, somewhere along the line RENT lost its heart. It’s not that the filmmakers and actors intentionally got it wrong. The cast, at least, seems to care deeply about this material, though in Columbus’s case it’s hard to say whether indifference or incompetence is responsible for his clunky direction. There’s only so much gritty bohemianism, after all, one can expect from a fiftyish man with gray hair who wears a baseball cap backwards and listens to Green Day, as Columbus does in the making-of documentary that accompanies the DVD.

But perhaps RENT’s decline was inevitable, considering that the cultural moment it caught hold of is past, and that the cast is more than a dozen years removed from when they were all struggling actors and musicians much like the characters they played. The lyrics, though, ring clear, and while listening to the soundtrack, without being distracted by awkward staging or the lines on Mark’s forehead, you can still get a sense of the energy and raw emotion that made RENT such a hit.