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Thom Fitzgerald adds a novel touch to his case for assisted suicide by structuring his film into a quasi-mystery that unfolds through flashbacks. He’s also corralled a gifted cast, with Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould co-writer Don McKellar as Matt, an AIDS-afflicted musician for whom drug cocktails no longer work; Jane Leeves as his grief-racked grief-counselor friend; Olympia Dukakis as his empathetic mother; Sarah Polley as his headstrong sister; and Parker Posey as the icy assistant DA who’s investigating his death — and the suspicious demise of other gay men in Matt’s NYC neighborhood. But the film is too long by a half-hour, and its digital-video dowdiness only makes its longueurs that much more arduous. Posey gets TV-movie dialogue to chew on, but Dukakis is heartrending, and Polley has one startling scene in which, having just learned that Matt is dying, she has to screen-test a commercial for a yeast-infection remedy called Vagimar: as she laughs uncontrollably at the absurdity of the stilted sales pitch, her manic sniggers imperceptibly give way to tears. It’s such flashes of feeling, or the unforced pathos of the moment when Matt lies down for the last time, that redeem what might have been a dreary, overearnest drama. (110 minutes) At the Kendall Square (through Tuesday).