"Rent" is a stage musical that wants to be a movie musical. Many stage musicals, from "Oklahoma!" to "West Side Story," feel right at home on the screen. "Rent" on film is missing a crucial element of its life-support system: a live audience. The stage production surrounded the audience with the characters and the production. It lacked the song "We Are Family," but that was the subtext. On film, "Rent" is the sound of one hand clapping.

It is not a bad film. It may be about as good a film as the material can inspire. The performances have a presence and poignancy that can feel surprisingly real, given the contrivances of the story. The film uses many of the same actors who starred in the original 1996 New York production, and the newcomers, Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms, earn their roles. But if you stand back from the importance of "Rent" as a cultural artifact and a statement about AIDS, does it stand on its own as a musical?

I don't think so. The song lyrics by Jonathan Larson have an ungainly quality, perhaps deliberate; the words often seem at right angles to the music. I do not demand that lyrics scan, rhyme and make sense, but I do think they should flow with, or even against, the music; here the words and the music sometimes play as if two radios have been left on at the same time ("My T-cells are low" doesn't strike me as an especially singable line). The music serves the choreography, the words serve the story, but they don't serve each other.

The film left me in a curious state: I felt more respect than affection. From some of the more compelling characters, including Mimi (Dawson) and Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), there are three-dimensional portraits that are convincing on any level. But the roommates in that artist's loft seem just as much of a casting call as they do in Puccini's "La Boheme," the opera that inspired "Rent." They're so busy being bohemian and flaunting authority that they never find time to be themselves.

I no more believe Mark (Anthony Rapp) is a documentary filmmaker and Roger (Adam Pascal) is a musician than I believed Marcello and Rodolfo were an artist and a playwright in the Puccini version. When the roommates feed a fire with their screenplays and compositions because it is cold in their unheated loft, I know they are only following Puccini, but I didn't believe it in "La Boheme" and I believe it less now. No matter; the job of the roommates in both versions is to be good friends of Mimi, but careless, so that they misplace her and she dies, although not before being hurried onstage for her death scene.

The characters who did convince me have lives apart from the opera (or soap opera) elements in the story. Mimi is played by Dawson as a stripper who shoots drugs and has AIDS because of a tainted needle. She tries to clean up, but falls back into drugs and they kill her. Angel (Heredia) is a transvestite who finds Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) mugged in an alley, and tenderly cares for him as they fall in love. Angel's life force inspires a particularly moving tribute late in the film — one of those scenes that affect us like the real thing might.

There is a romantic triangle involving Mark, whose girlfriend, Maureen (Idina Menzel), dumps him for a girlfriend of her own, Joanne (Tracie Thoms). I believed the character of Joanne, but neither Maureen nor Roger. He doesn't seem much depressed by being dumped, and she's so superficial that she flirts with the cute female bartender at her partnering ceremony with Joanne.

Roger and Mark had a third roommate, Benjamin (Taye Diggs), before he married, moved out and became their landlord. Benjamin is a character conceived entirely for the convenience of the plot. When needed, he threatens eviction, sics the cops on their rent strike, is partly responsible for the riot after Maureen's performance.

The story is set in 1989, a time when AIDS provided the same kind of death sentence that tuberculosis provided in 19th-century novels and operas. Through the story characters remind each other, "take your AZT," but some of them do not, apparently so they can exhibit, I dunno, a death wish, self-hatred, denial, or a desire to supply the playwright with tragedy. This is much the function provided by Puccini's original Mimi, who coughs in Act Three so that she can die in Act Four. More convincing is the treatment of Mimi's drug addiction in the modern version; Rosario Dawson plays Mimi as hooked and hopeless, and we believe her.

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