Racing for their lives.

In a stirring new documentary, an HIV-positive crew competes in a famed yacht race

Rock the Boat * Directed by Bobby Houston * Tell the Truth Pictures

If I have one life to live, let me live it as a stockbroker. What a deal. You make your first fortune by 26, burn out by 29, then take your pile and reinvent yourself by 30 with the sort of creativity and daring that we liberal arts drudges spend our lives dreaming about.

Perhaps that doesn't precisely reflect the career arc of Robert Hudson, a former moneyman turned sea maven. Diagnosed with HIV in 1991, this rugged Californian eventually founded a nonprofit support system for AIDS survivors, then got this dewy-eyed notion to sail an all-HIV-positive crew across the Pacific. In 1997 Hudson and nine guys with lousy T-cell counts entered the celebrated Transpacific Yacht Race from California to Hawaii. An 11th sailor, the only HIV-negative one, came along. He brought a movie camera.

Rock the Boat is the result, and it's as stirring an adventure as you are likely to see this year. Bobby Houston's peripatetic lens captures it all: the down-to-the-wire prelaunch snafus, the "Will they make it to the starting gate?" tensions, the storms at sea, the smoldering personality conflicts, the stoically uttered nauticalspeak, the eleventh-hour challenges, the "Will they make it to the finish line?" tensions. It will make you feel butch by proxy.

Like so many really good documentaries, Rock the Boat has the integrity to become something other than what it may have initially intended. Houston, whom we observe only once in a brief prologue in which he recites a litany of loved ones lost to AIDS, seems from the outset to be pointing us toward a conventionally inspirational triumph-of-human-spirit thing. The early footage spends a goodly amount of time with finger-wagging safe-sex messages as it underscores just how sick these guys were before the coming of protease inhibitors.

Once the good ship Survivor sets sail and the guys start behaving badly, that's when Houston has a movie. He could have chosen to compile a noble admixture of heroics and cordial male bonding that would have offered a bracing challenge to the gays-in-the-military opponents. Instead he leaves in the hissy fits, the diva turns, the withholding, and the outbursts. Anyone who has ever done a house share at the Russian River or Fire Island Pines will shudder in recognition.

How much of this acting-out is a function of sublimated sexual tension is one issue that is assiduously sidestepped. Houston and Hudson, who also produced the film, would rather remind us that gay men are guys first and queers second: We pull the same male power trips and suffer the same manly dysfunction with communication. In one of my favorite moments, the sweetly prissy but shoot-from-the-hip chef, Ted, admonishes Hudson and the stiff-lipped captain for their trickle-down disunity. "So," he snaps, "we've got three days to work like a team and not a bunch of fags sailing to Hawaii!" To which the captain, his top-man reserve cracking, responds, "Girl, don't you go there."

It's safe to say you could comb every inch of C.S. Forester's Horn-blower novels backward and forward and not find an exchange to match that.

It won't hurt the box office that Hudson has assembled the sort of crew one always fantasizes will be on those gay cruises--blondish, 30ish, all Gleem smiles and no love handles--instead of the male facsimile of mother's mah-jongg club one usually finds. They don't come in first, but they are bona fide American heroes. So where are the ticker tape parades, dear mayors?

Stuart is theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.