Working with screenwriters Cunningham O'Keefe and Lazaro Gomez Carriles and using Arenas' posthumously published memoirs and bits and pieces of his loosely autobiographical novels, Schnabel creates a masterpiece of cinematic expression that merges beauty, color, and exceptional acting. When a teacher tells Reinaldo's father that his son has a gift for poetry, the father is incensed and driven to violence. The family later moves to the city, where the teenage Reinaldo is stirred by the excitement of Castro's revolution and runs away to join the rebels. Eventually making his way to Havana, Arenas awakens both sexually, with initially timid and then more aggressive homosexual encounters, and artistically, when his first novel is published. They create beauty and beauty is the enemy.
Artists are counterrevolutionaries.
Once released from prison, Arenas takes advantage of the Castro-sanctioned exodus of those deemed unfit to be Cubans. He goes to New York where he lives for the next ten years until his slow decline from AIDS causes him to commit suicide in 1990. Using a free-floating, sometimes phantasmagoric style, Schnabel bypasses the usual conventions of the biopic in Before Night Falls by opting to paint Arenas' life in broad strokes, almost as it if were a dream the poet himself might have had of his own life. Never delving too deep, the film refrains from examination or judgment, instead offering a visualization of Arenas through feelings, colors, and textures that allow the viewer to draw his own conclusions. Bardem plays Arenas with great thoughtfulness as he portrays Arenas' growth from timid and uncertain writer to committed artist and revolutionary.