The movie isn't always a model of clarity. Schnabel immerses us in the atmosphere before giving us our bearings and he doesn't always identify the characters or their relation to each other. But the occasional confusions are a small price to pay for a director who places enough trust in his audience's intelligence to not spell everything out for them, to work allusively rather than declaratively to convey the meanings of Reinaldo Arenas' life.

Born in 1943, Arenas came of age during Castro's revolution, even running away to join the rebels (though he saw no action). But after Castro came to power, the show trials and the executions with no trials of any kind, the "People's Farms" that were not allowed to provide food to starving citizens, the political and intellectual purges, gradually convinced Arenas that Cuba had merely traded one dictatorship for another. It was Arenas' homosexuality and what the government deemed the "counterrevolutionary" tenor of his novels (many were published abroad after being smuggled out) that resulted in years of persecution and finally a stint in one of Castro's prisons. When Castro expelled the "riffraff" during the 1980 Mariel boat lifts, Arenas, who was on a list of people forbidden to leave, escaped by changing the name on his passport. Settling in New York, he taught, wrote and lectured until, in the final stages of AIDS, he took his life in 1990.

Arenas began his memoir "Before Night Falls" before escaping from Cuba and completed it in New York. Its title refers to the daylight he had in which to write while hiding out from the police in the woods. It is a great book, in which the excitement of intellectual and sexual coming-of-age is both thwarted and intensified by the political repression that threatens to end them both. There's a touch of gay machismo swaggering through Arenas' prose; every trip to the beach, every bus ride, even a simple request for a light from a stranger on the street is an excuse for sex. Mixing Arenas' randiness with his rage toward Castro, the book reads like a combination of Joe Orton's diaries and George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia."

In part an act of revenge, the memoir is not always generous. Arenas delights in outing people who moved on to high positions in Castro's regime, and he has no time for the writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Eduardo Galeano, who he despises for siding with Castro. It would take an inhuman capacity for forgiveness for a writer who carried on his work in the face of real repression to excuse those who lied about or excused that repression.

Experience always confounds ideology, and after his escape Arenas became somewhat of an inconvenience. The left, always ready to embrace a persecuted writer, didn't know what to do with one who shattered any illusions they harbored about Castro being a benevolent dictator. (It certainly didn't help Arenas that in the Reagan years, simply insisting on the reality of life under communism was enough to get you accused of siding with Reagan's simplistic jingoism.) At a Harvard reception, a German professor, his plate piled high with food, told Arenas that he believed Castro had done great things for Cuba. After informing the academic that, in Cuba, only government officials could eat so well, Arenas threw the man's plate against the wall. The book suggests the toll that bitterness took on Arenas.

In his lovely memoir of Arenas in the book "Eminent Maricones," the novelist, poet and critic Jaime Manrique talked of "the truly Dostoyevskian side to [Arenas'] nature." Once, in a fit of rage, he said to Manrique, "There is no way on earth I can forget what I went through. It's my duty to remember. This will not be over until Castro is dead. Or I am dead."

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