Director Chris Columbus (of early "Harry Potter" fame) delivers a smash powerhouse of song and dance in bringing Jonathan Larson's prizewinning urban rock musical to the screen. Bursting with talent, its story of a band of renters facing eviction from tenements in New York's East Village is based on Puccini's classic opera about bohemians of the Latin Quarter, La BohŠme. In this adaptation, artists from varied performance disciplines, a philosopher and a lawyer are bound by love while struggling against poverty, rejection and the ravages of AIDS.

Roger (Adam Pascal) is an aspiring guitarist-songwriter who has become the love interest of his downstairs neighbor Mimi Marquez (Rosario Dawson), an exotic dancer in the early stages of AIDS. Despite this lady's utter sensuality and animal appeal, Roger rejects her overtures because of the state of emotional devastation he's in over the recent suicide of his girlfriend because of their contraction of the disease.

Roger's roommate Mark (Anthony Rapp) is a filmmaker with a camera always at hand to document his band of friends and the broader community as an art film. He, too, has lost a girlfriend, Maureen (Idina Menzel), a self-indulgent, flamboyant performance artist who has replaced Mark in her affections with a lawyer named Joanne (Tracie Thoms).

Very close friend Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin, "Law and Order") is mugged on his way to Roger and Mark's loft and meets good samaritan street drummer, Angel Shunard (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) in an alley. Angel wants nothing more than to nurse Collins back to health, begin a relationship and be a member of the clique. Both of them have AIDS, as well.

Then, there's Benny (Taye Diggs), who used to be part of this circle until he married the landlord's daughter. Now, he's the ultra-clean, finely suited alien who delivers Roger and Tom's eviction notices for lack of rent. Booo.

All of which manifests itself as an extended explosion of song and dance to a strong beat and tight pacing where every cast member pulls their brilliantly creative weight, Dawson and Heredia perhaps the most outstanding. No important moment or development is left unsung and unchoreographed for a maximum outpouring of entertainment with Broadway delivery and laced with Marxist themes of social injustice. It's a powerful effort to live up to the musical's 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, four Tony Awards and three Drama Desk Awards. It's also a springboard to wider career possibilities for all the participants.

But, it's a bit of an overload. Exposition is packed into the lyrics and narrative passages are as scarce as beefsteak in a vegan restaurant -- more than welcome when they come. The brash amped-up energy of this celebration of camaraderie could drive sedate folks out into the streets. But, overrichness aside, there hasn't been this much tightly packed multi-talent squeezing the melodic and emotional juices out of an overripe theme since "Fame" in 1980. The message of defying the law and justifying the avoidance of rent smacks of 1930s socialism. That, and its Disneyish ending are made tolerable only through the art of dynamic performance.

                                      ~~  Jules Brenner