The original theme song of the musical, Rent, follows as the film opens in the East Village of New York on Christmas Eve, 1989. Roger and Mark are trying to avoid being evicted from their previously rent-free apartment. Another outstanding song on the Rent movie soundtrack is the duet Take Me or Leave Me where Maureen and her lesbian lover Joanne are having a quarrel at an engagement announcement party hosted by the parents of Joanne. The local bar is the perfect setting for the energetic rendition of La Vie Boheme. It captures the nonconformity of the main characters, which is further emphasized by everyone dancing on the tables.
In virtually every musical, the characters break into song to express their inner selves. But in Rent, the movie version of Jonathan Larson's exuberant pop-rock tribute to the squalid lower Manhattan bohemia of the late 1980s, the characters have almost no outer selves. When they sing, their catchy epiphanies of deep-dish feeling are all there is to them. The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater )— into a rhapsody of the everyday.
