'NIGHT FALLS' PAINTS INTRIGUING PORTRAIT OF ARTIST.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Sometimes, it takes an artist.

Julian Schnabel, the New York painter and sculptor who made an adequate but unwieldy directing debut with ``Basquiat'' a few years ago, has done a much more effective job with his sophomore effort. ``Before Night Falls,'' like the previous film about Schanbel's Big Apple contemporary, looks at another Caribbean artist who died much too young.

The difference seems to be that Jean Michel Basquiat was your basic, inscrutable, self-destructive genius. Reinaldo Arenas, on the other hand, was constantly persecuted by outside forces for the expression that gave him life. The latter is obviously the more inspiring story, and it has inspired Schnabel, in good stretches of this movie, to world-class filmmaking.

Also clearly invigorated by the material: Javier Bardem, a broken-nosed Spanish hulk of an actor, who here gives the most sensitive, quicksilver, multifaceted male performance of the movie year. Acting, for the most part, in unfamiliar, accented English, Bardem portrays the gay Cuban writer as a man ever-amazed by his own passions, yet smart enough to know how much trouble they will bring his way. It's an amazing display of something that some may view as stubborn naivete and the least charitable might call stupidity, but is more the kind of special, holy innocence that the true subversive simply breathes.

But if Bardem had stopped there, Arenas might have just come off as a victim and martyr. Rather, he gets the full range of the writer's creative euphoria (traditionally, one of the hardest qualities to evoke on film), bitter disappointment, justifiable paranoia and rich inner fantasy life across. And often, with the help of his two great cinematographers, Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas, Schnabel does a simply breathtaking job of melding Bardem's performance and Arenas' world view into pure poetic imagery.

Arenas was born to an impoverished, single and pretty-unhappy-about-it mother in rural Oriente province in 1943. Bedazzled, as every viewer will be, by the primal natural environment that was his childhood playground, the talented Arenas became a fervent backer of Castro's revolution as a teen-ager. Moving to Havana in the wake of the communist victory, he found early success as a writer and all the fun he could wish for in the city's thriving gay community.

Schnabel does a wonderful job of capturing the bizarre combination of hedonistic decadence and socialist commitment that marked 1960s Cuba. But by the end of the decade, the regime viciously turned on its writers and homosexuals, making life particularly difficult for Arenas.

Friends and lovers betray him, his works are confiscated, he's arrested on trumped-up charges, he escapes, gets caught again and gets sent to a prison full of violent criminals. Being literate, Arenas soon turns them into allies by writing their letters. Johnny Depp has a great double bit here as the sexy transvestite who tries to smuggle out Arenas' contraband manuscripts and the sadistic interrogator on whom the writer develops an inadvisable crush.

Arenas eventually came to America in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, but his trials did not end. Impoverished, though working at a furious pace, he died of AIDS complications in New York a few years later. These naturally more subdued scenes prove less engaging than the Cuban sections of the film, which were staged remarkably convincingly in Merida and Veracruz, Mexico. But in a season shared by such other fine artist's bio-films as ``Pollock'' and ``Quills,'' ``Before Night Falls'' still boasts the best balance of emotional persuasiveness and imaginative impressionism.

``BEFORE NIGHT FALLS''

(Rated R: sex, language, nudity, violence)

The stars: Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea Di Stefano, Johnny Depp.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Julian Schnabel. Written by Cunningham O'Keefe, Lazaro Gomez Carriles and Schnabel, based on Reinaldo Arenas' books. Produced by Jon Kilik. Released by Fine Line Features.

Running time: Two hours, 13 minutes.

Playing: Sunset 5, West Hollywood; NuWilshire, Santa Monica; Playhouse 7, Pasadena.

Our rating: Three and one half stars

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Javier Bardem, left, and Johnny Depp star in ``Before Night Falls,'' about Cuban-born artist Reinaldo Arenas.