With 'Rent,' the lease is up

Remember when ''Chicago" came out in 2002 and a grand new era of modern movie musicals was formally declared open?

With the release of ''Rent," that era could now officially be declared closed.

Hard-core ''Rent"-heads will disagree, but they'll be the only ones, much as ''Phantom of the Opera" fans made up the sole audience for last year's disastrous film version. The big-screen adaptation of the 1996 Broadway hit ''Rent" has so many things wrong with it that it's difficult to know where to start, so let's just state the obvious: Chris Columbus. The director of bland box-office bonanzas such as ''Home Alone" and the first two ''Harry Potter" films is not who springs to mind when you think all-singing-all-dancing.

The movie marks an interesting throwback to the kind of film musicals in which people unapologetically burst into song -- as opposed to ''Chicago," where the numbers took place in some odd psychic fantasy universe. Yet time and again Columbus and editor Richard Pearson sap the film's momentum by letting a song end, taking a long pause, then fading to black. If they're waiting for applause, they're waiting in vain: ''Rent" is filled with dead air, and the two numbers that do get a groove on -- ''Tango: Maureen" and ''La Vie Boheme" -- have an energy that immediately dissipates once they're over.

At the heart of the movie's failure are two larger miscalculations: that ''Rent" has anything to do with the subject it ostensibly addresses -- starving bohemians in the East Village of the late 1980s -- and that the modern Broadway musical can exist outside its increasingly rarefied environs.

When ''Rent" opened on April 29, 1996, at the Nederlander Theater, it was embraced by mainstream audiences as a blast of urban power. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and four Tony awards, including best musical and best score, the pop adaptation of Puccini's ''La Boheme" had the proper street cred -- it was nurtured at the New York Theatre Workshop before moving uptown -- and had already been raised to mythic status by the death of writer-composer Jonathan Larson from an aortic tear the night of the play's off-Broadway opening. A personal and theatrical tragedy, Larson's death was undeniably great publicity, and it shrouded ''Rent" in the kind of moving all-caps irony Broadway aficionados adore.

Would the show still be running if Larson had lived? Possibly, but it's the musicals he didn't go on to write that are the greater loss. ''Rent" shocked Broadway audiences because it concerned the ''daring" subjects of homosexuality, drug abuse, and AIDS, but it was and remains middlebrow schlock, with a heart-on-the-sleeve emotionalism that puts it closer to Celine Dion than to the Ramones.

By contrast, the East Village has historically been where people have gone to get away from the mainstream. In the 1960s through 1980s, it was the neighborhood of squatters, the Tompkins Square riots, smack dealers lowering tin cans full of glassine envelopes from the third floors of tenements, transsexuals back before RuPaul made them hip, a zillion rock bands pounding out noise that would make a Broadway audience's ears bleed. Read the indispensable 1996 oral history ''Please Kill Me," by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, if you want to know what the scene felt like in the 1970s.

In the late '80s, when ''Rent" takes place, a tranny like Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) would have been twirling the night away to acid house, Depeche Mode, and the Pet Shop Boys, while Roger the rocker (Adam Pascal) might have been listening to Yo La Tengo and Mother Love Bone, a Seattle band whose nucleus would go on to form Pearl Jam. Mark the filmmaker (Anthony Rapp) would be making hipster alterna-flicks a la Jim Jarmusch and Susan Seidelman or rigorous experimental cinema, not Bolex home movies of his pals. Maureen's performance pieces would be cut from the avant-garde cloth of Laurie Anderson and Karen Finley rather than a scared-silly parody of same that allowed audiences the comfort of ridicule.

If ''Rent" were about the East Village, in other words -- if it truly embraced the nihilism and creative ferment that marked the best of what came from St. Marks Place and points east -- uptown audiences would have run screaming in the opposite direction.

But it didn't and it doesn't. Roger's rock songs have the hoarse mall-rock urgency of Bryan Adams lite, and ballads such as ''I'll Cover You" are melodramatically unsubtle in the grand tradition of Broadway corn. A song such as ''La Vie Boheme" works because it possesses the unabashed verbal play of a musical patter song; ''Tango: Maureen" has an arch wit that echoes the work of Stephen Sondheim; ''Seasons of Love" gets by on its soaring, open-throated harmonies. The best moments in ''Rent" are honest show tunes rooted in traditions blocks north and psychic miles from its setting. The worst strain to be hip and stop somewhere north of 14th Street.

Why should this matter? What's wrong with replacing grit with broad-appeal sentiment? Nothing, other than providing the Times Square tourist trade with a fake authenticity that sends people home feeling they've touched something they haven't. With theater tickets costing in the three figures, though, substance is a liability and comfort is at a premium. As Sondheim said in a 2000 interview, the modern corporate musical ''has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture." Even without the new ''Rent," that criticism applies with equal force to movies.

Nobody goes to musicals for authenticity, of course -- arguably, no one ever has -- and there is evidence that Broadway is getting lighter on its feet. The arrival of ''The Producers" in 2001 and ''Hairspray" in 2002 proved that even recycled entertainment could hold deep-dish pleasures, and if the ''Producers" movie due in a month clicks, there may still be hope for screen musicals. Better yet, the successes of ''Urinetown" (2001) and this season's revival of Sondheim's ''Sweeney Todd" offer proof that darker shades of wit and creativity can flourish on the midtown boards. In their wake, the big shows of the previous two decades -- ''Rent," ''Phantom," and all the rest -- look like lumbering dinosaurs. ''Rent" the movie merely serves as their tombstone.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com