Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Spain's most acclaimed young actor, Javier Bardem, makes his American debut in this cinematic parable and portrait of Reinaldo Arenas, who was persecuted for literary and sexual transgressions in Cuba.

A writer and homosexual, Arenas was perceived as a threat to Fidel Castro on both counts. After escaping from the haunting Kafkaesque nightmare of the notorious, overcrowded El Morro prison, where dissidents and gays mingled with murderers and rapists, he tried unsuccessfully to flee Cuba by inner tube before emigrating to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift of "undesirables." Arenas settled in New York's Greenwich Village where, suffering from AIDS, he committed suicide at the age of 47.

Like his first film about New York, graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel directs this righteously honest, fragmented, impressionistic biography with intelligence, delicacy and craftsmanship, beginning with Arenas's rural childhood that, despite his family's poverty, was marked by an idyllic communion with nature, using his poems and quotations from his memoir in the voice-over narration.

In the visually vignette-oriented story, Schnabel and his cinematographers Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas utilize various film stocks and distinctive colorations but without the flashiness of Steven Soderberg's "Traffic."

While exploring Arenas's obsession with sensual, indiscriminate sex (he claimed to have had 5,000 lovers by age 25), the screenplay by Cunningham O'Keefe, Lazaro Gomez Carriles and Schnabel, however, offers little analysis or explanation for Arenas's quirks of character.

Schnabel had originally envisioned Benicio Del Toro as Arenas with Bardem in a supporting role but, when Del Toro dropped out, Bardem somewhat reluctantly stepped in. And it's Bardem's dynamic, astonishing performance that elevates the overwhelming dreariness and depression of the fragmented tale.

Along with co-stars Olivier Martinez and Andrea Di Stefano, Sean Penn and Hector Babenco do brief cameos and Johnny Depp does two, one as a drag-queen who smuggles Arenas's manuscripts out of prison and a second as a manipulative prison guard. Schnabel's wife, Olatz Lopez Garamendia, appears as Reinaldo's mother.

This film is in English and Spanish with English subtitles and there is frontal male nudity. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Before Night Falls" is a strong, poetic, imaginative 8, representing freedom of expression in both form and content. Arenas's cry, "I'm a citizen of nowhere...the State Department declared me a citizen of nowhere, so I legally don't exist," resonates.

Recommended: Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age