Making its statement as part of the New Directors/New Films Series, The Living End is typically offbeat, loaded with startling visuals and much inside and outside gay humor. But it's a very bumpy ride that alternates between being fun and exciting and making one carsick.

Those familiar with Araki's work will understand his seemingly lighthearted approach towards AIDS. His methods are no less effective in keeping alive the deadly disease in the public's mind. He just has more fun in doing so. The major problem, however, is that The Living End is aimed mainly at the gay audience, which is already quite sadly familiar with AIDS. Despite the approachable humor, the graphic gay sex will turn off most of the heterosexual audience, except for perhaps the most open-minded among the art-house crowd. Of course, Araki's intent may not be to spread the AIDS message, but simply to entertain. In this he is successful.

Though this road flick loses its direction, and ultimately winds up in a rambling, somewhat unsatisfying fashion there are enough memorable moments en route to make the trip worthwhile.

The two main characters are Jon (Craig Gilmore), who has just discovered he has AIDS, and Luke (Mike Dytri), a carefree loner who has a penchant for urinating in public places.

After escaping from a pair of funny, gun-toting lesbians, Luke finds himself playing tennis on some guy's butt, witnessing that guy's wife stab him to death, then himself shooting three gay-bashers. Covered in blood, he stumbles onto Jon, who obligingly takes him home. Jon is a bit of an uptight wimp, while Luke is a tough, arrogant daredevil. Still, they fall in love and decide to hit the road.

Luke feels that now that both of them might have AIDS, they should proceed with reckless abandon. They have nothing to lose. Jon, against type, goes along with him, but stays in constant touch with his adoring friend Darcy (Darcy Marta), who worries so much about Jon that it affects her sex life with boyfriend Peter (Scot Goetz).

There are some genuinely hilarious moments, but the killing power of AIDS is always just beneath the surface of each frame.

By the time Jon and Luke meet 20 minutes into the film, Jon, reeling from his bad news, is so vulnerable to the reckless Luke, who's also HIV-positive, that he's soon driving him to San Francisco, where Luke promises, "I'll figure something out." Luke, in fact, is on the lam, having inadvertantly killed a cop in L.A.

Luke is a quintessential male street hustler, and his looks -- as well as his life -- may be fleeting, but for the moment, he's a gay macho fantasy. Living entirely by his wits and his body, Luke is the kind of guy who can quickly become bad news, but Araki moves beyond this stereotype to show us a man with both a hunger and capacity for love.

We know Jon's type from Araki's previous two no-budget features, Three Bewildered People In The Night and The Long Weekend (O' Despair). Jon has a small but nice apartment filled with pop art collectibles and movie posters. He dabbles in free-lance film articles -- he's currently writing, amusingly enough, one he calls "The Death of the Cinema." Wheras Luke, a headstrong man of action, is a new kind of character for Araki, Jon is typical of Araki's young people -- educated, neurotic, sitting around and thrashing about trying to figure out what to do with their lives, and in some instances, to sort out their sexual identities.

Punctuated with natural sounds and cutting-edge music, The Living End is also a new kind of movie for the filmmaker, who retains his starkly beautiful vision of a lonely, nihilistic L.A. but who moves for the first time into genre, in this case the road movie.

That the young men are gay at once energizes the genre, and the genre in turn brings gays closer to the mainstream. Look at what Thelma & Louise did for the road picture -- and for women on the screen.

Araki has always presented a mix of gays and straights in close, supportive friendships, but this is the first time he's told an out-and-out gay love story involving two young men of very different temperaments, lifestyles and values. Araki does leave them from time to time to focus on Jon's best friend Darcy Darcy Marta), who seems to love Jon more than her boyfriend and is increasingly worried about him running off with Luke.

On another level The Living End (Times-rated Mature for adult themes, lovemaking, language) is perhaps most important as an expression of rage over the catastrophe of AIDS, the Reagan-Bush administrations in particular, and, in general, a revelation of just how profoundly dislocating a positive result for the HIV test can be. The entire thrust of this provocative, harrowing yet ironically exhilarating film is to make it clear that ultimately, alienated by the AIDS virus rather than by sexual orientation, Jon and Luke have only each other.

Sort of a gay Thelma & Louise, it charts two HIV-positive lovers' irresponsible road trip across the American West. Being the minimalist that he is, Araki sets most of the action inside an old car, and every supposedly far-flung setting looks like Tujunga. But Living End's palpable sense of desperation and doomed liberation comes across even more potently than it did in the film about the outlaw ladies. And Araki certainly comes closer to justifying murder (without finally endorsing the idea), a morally indefensible but artistically audacious ploy.

The Living End is also pretty funny, except when the dialogue gets mired in Araki's trademark self-pity. How's this for a setup: Hunky, homeless nihilist Luke (Mike Dytri) gets picked up hitch-hiking by two homicidal lesbians (Mary Woronov and Johanna Went). He manages to steal their car and gun before they can kill him, and later later uses the gun to turn the tables on some gay-bashing thugs.

Earlier that same day, sensitive writer Jon (Craig Gilmore) learns that he has tested positive for the AIDS virus. Devastated, he seeks solace from his best friend, a woman named Darcy (Darcy Marta). But that night he finds the comfort he really needs when Luke flags down Jon's car while fleeing from one of his numerous crimes.

It's lust at first sight, and even though Luke's violent outbursts greatly disturb Jon, their passion for one another turns all-consuming. Eventually they hit the road, robbing and rutting their way along with no concern for their already limited future. But even the condemned have to recognize the point at which the party's over.

Dytri gives the first great performance ever registered in an Araki film. He's dangerous and demented, yet admirably true to his strong, hair-trigger feelings. Gilmore does a lot with the more analytical role, but no performer has ever completely overcome being cast as one of Araki's existential sad sacks.

The director himself fills the soundtrack with grinding, punk-metal drone, and his frames with studiedly amateurish lighting, sets and compositions. Yet Araki can't hide the fact that he's maturing into a thoughtful, powerful filmmaker -- The Living End's climactic set piece alone provides an indelible image of love in the AIDS generation.

If he isn't careful, people might stop saying Araki is all attitude and may start accusing him of being a real artist.

Longtime Companion placed the AIDS crisis on the table as a gay agenda for thousands of moviegoers who otherwise would receive it only in the hetero haven of The Ryan White Story. But it also tailored gay life to straight expectations: its characters were regular old yuppies who happened to be gay, and who met catastrophe with impossible heroism and dignity. Dignity is a low priority in The Living End, a film that panders to nobody, makes no excuses for its sexuality, refuses to turn its characters into noble martyrs, and takes flying pot shots at the myths of straight normality whenever the opportunity presents itself. Araki would rather have you anxious and enraged than weepy.

Irresponsibility is a code of honor for Araki, whose films walk a cranky line between tragic romanticism, worldly disenchantment, and a giggly prankishness that wouldn't look amiss on Melrose Place. He describes himself as a fan of "godard movies, screwball comedies, alternative/industrial music, this mortal coil, and grilled cheese sandwiches." That about covers the sensibility, though Araki's a little too fond of the sandwiches to qualify as a hardcore existentialist sad sack. He's a perky Southern California nihilist with a weakness for whimsy that helps him avoid solemnity, but also cheapens the angry, disaffected intelligence in his movies. The people in his films clutter their apartments with giant inflatable dinosaurs, squeaky rubber asses, and plastic fish that jump when you clap your hands. That's L.A. -- well, Melrose -- but to judge from the amount of footage he squanders on all the pop toys, Araki thinks it's really cool stuff.

"I'd rather be trendy than boring," declares one young armchair revolutionary in Araki's award-winning The Long Weekend (O' Despair), one of the few films to attract a decent-sized audience in the AFI's ill-fated independent film showcase series at the Monica 4-Plex last year. Made in black and white for $5,000 The Long Weekend is about a bunch of languid young marginals, gay and straight, who gather at the apartment of a depressed friend and spend the weekend mooning around a grungy L.A. filled with 7-Elevens and mini-malls, kvetching about being and nothingness and trying to figure out their relationships. That would be trendy and boring, but The Long Weekend was made with a light, self-parodic touch combined with a real sympathy for the loose-ended malaise of youth culture.

Araki describes The Living End as his most desperate movie to date. It's certainly his most bleakly romantic, a tale of impossible love in the face of certain death. Jon (played by soap-star Craig Gilmore) is a bemused writer with a West Hollywood haircut and Snoopy slippers whose recent HIV-positive diagnosis is disrupting the progress of his article on the death of cinema. (Araki, a USC film school graduate, loves to kill cinema: a copy of Andre Bazin's What Is Cinema Vol. I & II hits the trash can in the first minutes of The Long Weekend.)

Jon is moping all over his devoted best friend, Darcy (Darcy Marta), when Luke (Mike Dytri) explodes into his careful life. A loose cannon with gorgeous biceps and an apetite for instant pleasure that's rivaled only by his death wish, the feral Luke (also test-positive) seduces Jon in five seconds flat and then lands both of them in enough trouble to set up a fugitive road movie. Armed with his uncle's Gold Card and a gun stolen from the fierce dykes, Luke carries off a sullen but excited Jon on a compassles, clueless journey to nowhere -- nowhere being an all-too-real American West of supermarkets, gas stations, and fast-food joints, but also rife with Godardian allusions and menacing, weird figures.

Araki is a gritty surrealist in love with the politics and aesthetics of extremity. But he doesn't -- or doesn't yet -- have the intellectual chops or the assurance as a filmmaker to deliver a complex argument about the blackened soul of America without coming on like Monty Python doing Jean-Paul Sartre. Part of the problem is a script that has everybody talking like Valley girls ("Gross me out, why don't you?") and spills over with glib soundbites of glib sloganeering. "We got nothing to lose," Luke tells his squeamish lover. "We're totally free." Freedom includes knocking off three club-wielding gay-bashers and a cop, shooting up a recalcitrant autoteller, and periodically threatening his lover and himself with a gun in the mouth.

In The Living End violence functions as the symbol of both gay oppression and liberation, if only in the short term. Violence (and its flip side, indifference) defines Araki's America. True, it's a stagy cinematic brutality designed to send up the genre -- Araki didn't go to film school for nothing. But style doesn't get him off the hook: there's a disturbing hysteria in Araki's open enjoyment of bloody excess, a childishness that goes with the plastic dinosaurs.

The film's callow heedlessness hits the women in the movie especially hard: they're no more than extensions of Araki's loathing and narcissism. No doubt somebody, perhaps Araki, is going to argue that the two murderous lesbians represent women of power or some such garbage. To me they're offensive vaginas with teeth, and I'm curious to know what L.A. performance artist Johanna Went and actress Mary Woronov thought of their roles. Worse still, Jon's friend Darcy is a caricature of the free-spirited, kookily dressed artist: aside from the five seconds she spends contemplating magenta splashes on her canvas, she devotes herself to munching carrots dipped in peanut butter straight out of the jar and waiting around for collect calls from Jon. A full-time fag hag and earth mother, Darcy can no longer eat, sleep, or make love to her boyfriend. Nice fantasy, but most of us have to worry about our friends and go on living our lives.

The exhilarating thing about Araki is his willingness to take risks that lay him open to all kinds of criticism. Barreling on through his own inexperience, he becomes an acter-upper unto himself with a film that shrieks the politics of sheer bloody murder without a moment of redemption. In the closing scenes of The Living End, Jon develops a fever and a slight cough which might be the flu, or it might be first symptoms. The film is about the terror of what's still to come. "It's living inside me," says Luke curiosly as he slits open his own wrist. "But I can't see it. Can you? This just looks like regular old boring blood to me."

The Living End is dedicated to "the hundreds of thousands who've died and the hundreds of thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of republican fuckheads." Deliberately hopeless, it speaks to an abyss of fright and helplessness that no amount of support from friends or lovers can completely overcome, that only a cure for AIDS can remove. The Living End is about what it feels like to be young, healthy -- and doomed. It's irresponsible by design, and responsible by default.

The final budget for Araki's The Living End (this time more than $5,000 but still not much by even independent standards), his first feature filmed in color with synchronized sound, was just enough of an increase to equal his ambitions as a writer/director. And those considerable ambitions have resulted in one of the most successful films of our spent age, a no-apologies road movie in the tradition of Nicholas Ray and Terrence Malick about two HIV-positive men.

The Living End is a darkly shaded love story, with the threat of death from AIDS overpowering endemic homophobia, irrational violence, and an increasingly dysfunctional society. What brings young stud Luke (Mike Dytri) and sensitive writer Jon (Craig Gilmore together as lovers, and then sends them out on the road as fugitives, is the same good-natured romanticism that lead to their being infected with a deadly plague. They may be desperate at the end of the film, determined to have control over their lives, but the film unfolds in a deeply affecting way since Araki refrains from manipulating the viewer through excessive sentimentality -- this is not a "gay Thelma & Louise."

As he has proven in the past and in this film, Araki does not hold back his anger and disgust, or hesitate to put the camera in the middle of ugliness, but if his films resemble the early works of John Waters, it's only superficially. Waters never had a cause like Araki's in The Living End. Even the cartoonish, exaggerated style of the early confrontation scenes -- Luke surviving a ride with crazed lesbian serial killers (a show-stopping anti-man rave by Mary Woronov and Johanna Went), Luke gunning down three gay-bashers and confronting a hostile neo-Nazi ("adios infected dick suckers") -- mixes fantasy and reality in a way that mainstream Hollywood filmmakers only dream about.

But Araki's angry comedy does not dissolve into the safety of traditional satire, and by the end it achieves a soul-wrenching relevance that thoroughly condemns the status quo complacency of modern American life. The miracle is that Araki is able to say so much that needs to be said while making an openly, naturally gay film that many people should find palatable.

Araki has evolved, and The Living End is never dull to look at, expertly paced, and blessedly free of the awkwardness one associates with uncompromising and visionary filmmakers. From the close-up of blood on a gay-basher's sex, lies, and videotape T-shirt to Elysian Park and North Hollywood locations passing for the requisite wide-open spaces of a road movie, The Living End's funkiness and integrity conquer all limitations.

The performances are casual and accomplished, with Dytri and Gilmore alternating between steamy eroticism and edgy confrontation to rival memorable heterosexual film couples. Darcy Marta as Jon's one trustworthy friend likewise excels as a young woman who cannot accept betrayal.

Made possible by a donation of film and sound equipment by prolific experimental filmmaker Jon Jost, and a production grant from the American Film Institute, The Living End was written by Araki in 1990. He has stated that the anger he felt over the official governmental foot-dragging the AIDS epidemic, and the deperate attitudes of the characters, would hopefully be dated by the time the film was finished -- in other words, the AIDS plague would be a thing of the past and at least some progress would have been made towards more general acceptance of the gay lifestyle.

Images of protesters confronting police outside the Republican National Convention, speeches by the likes of Pat Buchanan, and the institutionalized prejudice of such entities as the U.S. military illustrate that the struggle for gay rights is an on-going one. Araki's film is a passionate comedy/tragedy that, like the few anti-apartheid films that have emerged from South Africa, is neither propaganda nor fatalistically self-absorbed. It deserves to be championed because it is an intelligent, risky, and ultimately stisfying work of art made in a hostile environment.

Underground Los Angeles filmmaker Gregg Araki, who wrote, directed, shot, and edited the film, subtitles it "an irresponsible movie" -- which only means that his bold mixture of black, gross-out humor and frank homoeroticism isn't likely to please the Pat Buchanan crowd. But the camp elements can't disguise the seriousness, the anger or the reckless talent that enabled Araki to produce this stylish, eloquent drama on a rock-bottom budget of $23,000. A longer, less successful version of the movie debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. Now fine-tuned -- but still defiantly funky -- The Living End builds to its powerful climax on a deserted beach, where the deperate odyssey comes to a startling conclusion. With a volatile combination of passion and bad manners, Araki ushers an old formula into the age of AIDS, and gives it new meaning.

Intriguing premise has a maleable young gay writer, John (Craig Gilmore), taking up with a callow, volatile, hard-boiled drifter, Luke (Mike Dytri), shortly after both learn they are HIV positive.

"Till death do us part" is their motto when they’re forced to hit the road after Luke pulls the trigger on a cop. "We’re totally free; we have nothing to lose," Luke exults, but filmmaker Araki can’t think of anyplace interesting to take them, and their company gets pretty dull as locations change but they don’t.

Luke’s destructive nature sets the tone for an affair that becomes more pathetic than celebratory; meanwhile, they get it on more times than Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart in Araki’s most explicitly gay footage to date.

Tag-lined "an irresponsible movie by Gregg Araki," pic sets a cheeky nihilistic tone at the outset and tools along smartly for several reels. Araki’s dialogue can be wickedly cleverwithin its underground parameters, which exclude family viewing, to say the least, and pic is occassionally fueled by a gleeful sick humor that owes something to Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul), who makes a cameo appearance.

Partly funded by an American Film Institute production grant, pic is the first color, sync-sound production for Araki and puts a remarkable amount of value on screen for a budget given as $20,000.

Shot with economy and verve and deftly lit by filmmaker Chris Munch (The Hours and Times), pic is not without its sterling moments. At one point the pistol-packing Luke blows away a foe wearing a T-shirt that reads sex, lies, and videotape -- a scene that brought the house down at the Sundance Film Festival, even as it raised the question of how much calculation can go into winning a slot in the competition here.

Araki gives his hypnotic film a raw intensity heightened by a surreal landscape and a jagged score from the likes of Braindead Sound Machine, KMFDM, and Coil. Only John's calls to his worried friend Darcy (Darcy Marta) remind us of reality. The pair's travelling fuck-fest is marked by humor, rage, desperation and, finally, true romantic longing.

In the harrowing, piercingly acted final scene, Luke's violence gives way to understanding. But the anger persists. Araki's fitting dedication embraces "the hundreds of thousands who've died and the hundreds of thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of Republican Fuckheads."