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Grade: B+

Verdict: A visually arresting, well-acted biopic that would be better in Spanish.

Details: Starring Javier Bardem and Olivier Martinez. Rated R for strong sexual content, some profanity and brief violence. Two hours, 13 minutes.

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Review: We first see Reinaldo Arenas as a toddler, nestled in a crib of mud that's dug into the yard of his family home in the Cuban countryside. It's an image of fecundity and decay, of a sort of premature imprisonment and death; it haunts the length of "Before Night Falls." You could say that from his very first moments, the writer was fending off an early burial.

Another visually arresting biopic about the struggles, triumphs and untimely death of an artist, this second movie from painter turned director Julian Schnabel marks a big leap forward from his "Basquiat." Dramatizing the novelist Arenas' lifelong pursuit of freedom--to write what he wanted, to love whom he wished--as a gay man in Castro's Cuba, Schnabel brings a painterly eye to the story. And the movie features a riveting, emotionally intense performance by Spanish actor Javier Bardem ("Live Flesh"). The National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics named Bardem the best actor of 2000; earlier this week, he received an Oscar nomination.

But despite the talent involved, despite the good intentions and the film's often indelible imagery, director Schnabel made a creative decision that backfires: He has the actors speaking English, including Bardem, who delivers chunks of Arenas' prose as voiceover narration. Many times, his thick accent and insecurity with the language make him almost impossible to understand. It's a miscalculation that nearly cripples the movie.

Still, you can experience "Night" as a series of impressionistic scenes, some easier to follow than others. The movie captures young Reinaldo's heady sense of freedom and growth as he sits at the desk in his first apartment, learning to become a writer. We witness his hesitant initiation into sex, as he's cruised by the arrogant Pepe (Andrea Di Stefano), and then his headfirst dive into the pleasures of the flesh.

As a gay man and impassioned writer, Arenas becomes a double threat in the eyes of Castro's henchmen. "People who make art are dangerous to dictatorships," he's told, and he learns the hard way after being imprisoned for his sexuality. His anti-authoritarian books are smuggled out of Cuba and published abroad. The double-edged irony here is that sex and writing are what make Arenas feel alive, but they're the very things that get him into trouble.

Using Mexico as a stand-in for Cuba, Schnabel successfully creates a sense of mounting dread and paranoia as Arenas' options become narrower every day. Street parties turn to panicked chaos as the police appear, herding people indiscriminately into jail. The ratcheting tension is reflected in Bardem's face. The actor gives a performance that goes from youthful joy to exhausted despair, then back again to temporary euphoria as Arenas finally finds his way out of Cuba. There's extra poignancy in the contrast between Bardem's bullish, beefy physical presence and the complete emotional humiliation his character endures.

After the fluidity and speed of most of the film, Schnabel smartly slows things down for the coda, as Arenas creeps in slow motion through the endless gray afternoon of a man with AIDS. It's a brutal irony, of the movie and of Arenas' biography, that he found the freedom he'd always sought, only to lose it again forever.

In the supporting cast, you have to look twice to recognize Sean Penn as a muttering peasant who gives the young Arenas a lift. You literally look twice at Johnny Depp's dual performance. He plays a brutal prison official who interrogates Arenas, and more memorably the transvestite Bon Bon, a prisoner who smuggles Arenas' manuscripts out of jail in a way that earns the movie's one big laugh. Why are these two actors here? It's hard to say, and their presence is a little distracting.

Though the language barrier sometimes makes "Before Night Falls" play like a foreign film sans subtitles, Schnabel fills the screen with a visual poetry that matches the angry passion of Arenas' writings--whether it's the child's-eye view of treetops passing overhead, or the image of a downed hot-air balloon, its silk rippling in the breeeze like the flesh of a shipwrecked dream.

— Steve Murray, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution