Back in the day, performance art was "happening." Artists raged on warehouse stages, backed by TV monitors and unreliable sound systems, pronouncing their frustrations to like-minded audiences. Rent remembers. It remembers performance artists, just as it remembers transvestites, strippers, evictees, heroin addicts and thin-voiced rockboys with poofy hair. It also remembers AIDS.

Though all of these elements are still with us—indeed, the play's targeted political and social imbalances remain entrenched—Chris Columbus' movie version of Rent, first staged in 1996, seems dated. True, Jonathan Larson's Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical took years to reach the screen, after being associated with directors like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. And true, the music retains its robust, guitar-fueled energy while the movie "opens out" the play in sensible, if banal, ways. And yet Rent feels anachronistic, and not just because it works too hard to please the famous Rentheads.

Ten years ago, Larson's concept was daringly simple and politically cogent. Based on Puccini's La Bohéme, Rent focused on the resilience of a new generation of oppressed "types," assorted victims of prejudice, poverty, addiction and disease. They sang and occasionally danced, very earnestly, about their fleeting lives as unemployed artists and rapturous lovers. Featuring six of the original eight stage cast members (10 years older, now), the film begins with the stagey, Chorus Linear "Seasons of Love," the principals lined up in separate spotlights, even as they belt rhapsodically about their connections, their shared "measures" for lives well lived (the primary one being the age-old favorite, "love").

From here, following two minutes of footage shot by aspiring filmmaker Mark (Anthony Rapp), the film cuts to "the street," where Mark rides his bike in traffic and frets about the blurring of boundaries between "real life" and fiction. It's a self-knowing introduction, as the song, "Rent," identifies its own dilemma: How to make melodrama and artifice compelling when experience has turned so sensational and illusory? Set in the East Village during 1989, the movie's primary location is the giant loft shared by Mark and Roger (Adam Pascal), both unable to make rent, and thus tempted by former roommate Benny (Taye Diggs) to cut a deal by convincing performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel) to cease her public protests against Benny's employer and father-in-law, a developer.

Depressed because he never wrote the "one song" by which he might be remembered, Roger appears in brief flashbacks with bleached hair and a junkie girlfriend, as he laments his current HIV+ status. Two minutes later, he's approached by lovely downstairs neighbor Mimi (Rosario Dawson), also a junkie, whose rendition of "Light My Candle" makes Roger think twice. He's been clean for years, the last girlfriend killed herself, and besides, he doesn't know she's positive too. The players are rounded out by lesbian lawyer/Maureen's new squeeze Joanne (Tracie Thoms), as well as ex-professor Tom (Jesse L. Martin) and his new romantic object, Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a spirited drag queen who plays a giant pickle bucket for coins and makes the best of her stereotypical limits.

Rent does offer up real ideas that still resonate in the current climate. Everyone here is concerned with property—intellectual, amorous and geographic—and no one seems able to work for money, save for Mimi (whose employment as an exotic dancer down at the Cat Scratch Club provides for a Guys and Dolls-y number, marked by sultry and impressive splits, girl-on-girl action and emphasis on Mimi's loneliness). And so, Mark takes a job with a "sleazy" TV tab show (working for Sarah Silverman, who extols his footage as "fresh" and "edgy") in order to pay, you know, rent.

The point of Mark's foray into "corporate America" is as heavy-handed as it sounds, but it does allow him to look after his coupled-off friends. Mark's own singleness makes this nice Jewish boy stand out, as, aside from his status as Maureen's ex, he has no love object on the horizon—unless you count the bracing number he does with Joanne, "Tango: Maureen," in which they detail the emotional costs of loving this relentlessly flirtatious beauty, or even more frustratingly, his friendship with Roger, whose temporary departure (to that mecca, San Diego) and return sets up what seems to be the passionate consummation of their relationship, as they embrace on a rooftop with cameras circling, singing "What You Own": "When you're living in America/ At the end of the millennium, / You're what you own."

Indeed. The cleverer themes tend to get lost in the ruckus, just as Mark's designation as team documentarian, translator and empathizer for his preoccupied friends, tends to be lost amid all the romantic conventions.

Rent Directed by Christopher Columbus, A Sony release, Now playing at area theaters