Alive & Kicking accomplishes everything Love! Valour! Compassion! tried for but without the exclamation points. Directed by Nancy Meckler (Sister, My Sister) from a screenplay by playwright Martin Sherman (Bent), the film, true to its title, invests new life in the prematurely moribund AIDS melodrama genre. The difference between Alive and Love! is essentially one of tone and point of view. The dichotomy between love and death, physical beauty and premature decay, is the same in both, as is the hip wit and verbal jousting. In Meckler's film, however, death and disease are not sanctified by sentiment; people suffer, lash out, and act with calculated cruelty and extraordinary grace.

Jason Flemyng's Tonio is a brilliant, beautiful dancer for an avant-garde London company. As he puts it, "My lover died six months ago. My best friend's in the hospital. I haven't gotten over the first. I haven't faced the second. So I've not been able to begin to deal with this." "This" is his own AIDS affliction, and despite his words, Tonio does deal with it, obsessing about his dancing and hardening a mask of bitter aloofness to protect him from love and to strike back at the illusion of youth and immortality that's betrayed him. But the wicked humor and penetrating acuity of ugly duckling AIDS counselor Jack (a dazzling Anthony Sher) melds with Tonio's brave absurdity, and a tumultuous, convincing, brilliantly choreographed love affair follows. Although ending with a dance segment just a cut above Love's tutu'd finale, Alive & Kicking makes a strong case that love and laughter can be, almost, a match for death. At the Kendall Square.