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Before Night Falls      It is all too easy in our society to become political and passionate, and yet how inured we are to the realities of true political passion. For some of us, chaining ourselves to a building or burning effigies is a strong statement, risking the wrath of the police and the legal system.

     And yet, for any fear we have that Portland Police Chief Mark Kroeker will turn his troops into jackbooted Nazis, most of us never have seen firsthand the astonishingly brutal realities of the world's political dissidence. Before Night Falls opens that dark and harrowing window, and the scene outside our comfy homes is not a pretty one.

     The film is adapted from the memoirs of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, born in squalor during the late 1950s. First shown to us as a child playing in a mud pit-his poor family's version of a playpen-he is always different from those around him.

     His stepfather beats him when a teacher says he has the gift of poetry, but he doesn't run away to join the Cuban rebels until his teen years. During the mid-1960s he arrives in Havana, where he gets a job at the National Library, and his first two lovers enter his life: a man and a typewriter.

     As Arenas awakens his soul as a lover and a poet, both elements become dangerous to him. His work is censored by the government, and homosexuals are rounded up into concentration camps and prisons.

     He eventually is imprisoned, but he devises an ingenious way to smuggle out his writings. The only way he ever can be released is to denounce his books, his friends and himself.

     But once free, will Arenas be able to live with what's left of his dignity and his world? And how much will he sacrifice to escape to the United States?

     "I have never met a boy as authentic as you, my son," one character tells him. Spanish actor Javier Bardem portrays him so realistically, we almost feel as if we're watching a documentary. Sean Penn and Johnny Depp make cameo appearances, unrecognizable and all the more powerful for it.

     Director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat) delivers a film full of stunning vistas amid crumbling filth, steeped with casual nudity, casual smoking and not-so-casual violence. Before Night Falls is raw and harrowing and real and will tear at your emotions without once stooping to sentimentality.

     Another character says, "People who create art are a threat to any dictatorship." As much as it might disturb your own sense of self-social, political, sexual-there is no denying that Before Night Falls is art. It is also beautifully filmed, splendidly acted and depressing as hell.