For Arenas, there's always a new book to read or write, and always new lovers to be sampled, even a group of Castro's soldiers who, in one scene, approach Arenas and his friends menacingly before giving themselves over to a naked campfire bacchanal that suggests kids at play as much as erotic abandon. At times, Javier Bardem's heavy-lidded eyes suggest a man who has done away with the need for sleep because there's simply too much going on. "All affirmations of life are diametrically opposed to dogmatic regimes," Arenas wrote in his memoir, and Schnabel suggests how as Castro's revolutionary state became more repressive, it inadvertently fed dissent. Even in a Communist dictatorship, this was the '60s, with all the sexual adventurism of the times.

In all the arts, but especially movies, pleasure is the enemy of schoolmarmish instruction and that seems to be Schnabel's dictum here. When Arenas meets the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima (Manuel Gonzalez), he tells him that beauty is the natural enemy of dictatorships because it opens realms of feeling that dictatorships deny. With his cinematographers Xavier Peréz Grobet and Guillermo Rosas, Schanbel turns Cuba into such a lush-looking place that he makes the repression seem like something of a violation of the natural order. In the opening scene, green trees swaying overhead appear to melt into each other, as if the visions of loveliness Cuba has to offer are fleeting, transitory, there for those with the eyes to see them and the quickness to retain them. The way Schnabel and his hero see the island becomes a form of visual music, and like the music in "Buena Vista Social Club," an expression of fullness and vitality. The grayness of the final scenes set in New York (when Arenas is dying of AIDS) are a letdown. But they get at the contradiction of how an artist longing for freedom may flourish more when he's struggling for it than when he has it.

What the movie is missing is a sense of humor and, most of all, sexual exuberance. There are some good jokes, like Johnny Depp (who also turns up -- looking fabulous -- as a transvestite) playing a prison interrogator who can't resist stroking himself as he regards a portrait of Castro, and a quick scene where Arenas uses an underwater mask to check out the packages of various male swimmers. But Schnabel doesn't match the mixture of delicacy and rut in Arenas' descriptions of his erotic encounters. He's a hustler with the expressive gifts of a voluptuary. The movie could have used some of the effrontery of Almodóvar's first films in which the death of Franco was the excuse for everyone's libido to go sky-high. The threat of exposure gives Arenas' sex life an added charge, but it's a charge the movie gets only fitfully.

Still, Schnabel has managed to avoid nearly every cliché of the tortured artist. This is only his second movie, after "Basquiat," but he has a command of technique that would be impressive in more seasoned directors. He seizes on images from the memoir and uses them almost as archetypes, as when the young Reinaldo dreamily comes upon a group of naked men bathing and happily splashing each other in the river. Even when he gives us a scene familiar from other movies, like the one where Reinaldo's teacher visits his grandfather's farm and tells them the boy has the sensitivity of a poet, he ends with something we haven't seen before. Silently taking in the teacher's declaration, the old men suddenly erupts in a scream of fury before grabbing an ax and dragging the boy into the yard where he chops down a tree in which Reinaldo has carved a poem in the bark. There's no sentimentality about the land or the people in the scene.

As good as it is, "Before Night Falls" might not work if Schnabel hadn't found a leading man to hold it together and the Spanish actor Javier Bardem has the understated charisma to pull it off. With his big build, curly dark hair and Roman nose, Bardem at times suggests a beefy Adam Arkin. Yet there's something tender about his reserves of humor and especially in the way he seems to caress his words when he speaks. Movie heroes who appear to have no trouble making sacrifices of conscience are always a little alienating; they make the rest of us feel like pikers. Bardem lets us see the fear in Arenas and that humanizes him. Instead of steely reserve, he gives us a flicker of defiant pride, but never without the apprehension that those displays of character are going to cost.

Both Schnabel and Bardem are into the sweaty joy of creation rather than the flossy prostration before the altar of culture that so often accompanies movies about the lives of artists. Remarking on the photos in the New York Times of Schnabel celebrating the movie's premiere in a party at his loft, a friend of mine said the neo-expressionist painter looks exactly like the movie he's made. With his hair and beard sticking out at all angles, his gut hanging out of his rumpled clothes, wet with the sweat of dancing to a Cuban band, Schnabel was the artist as rotund satyr. At its best "Before Night Falls" has the same grubby, masculine exultation of someone comfortable with the dirt under his fingernails and still capable of being enchanted by the melancholy of loss wafting in from some overheard tune.

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