Angels in America: A-

In a work so over-stuffed with ideas as Tony Kushner's Angels in America—an HBO movie adapted from Kushner's own Pulitzer-prize winning drama that liberally runs up to six hours—what more can there be to say of it except that it stuns: continually, unerringly, stubbornly, until your heart and brain swell and ache with the sheer volume of energy presented on screen. The time is 1985, New York City, and everywhere, in Kushner's world, people fret and dart about, sliced up by their interconnected bonds of disease, love, and politics. AIDS has just begun to ravage the city, and the millennium approaches; as many a character doth proclaim, history itself is opening up—"Anything can happen. Any awful thing."

At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.

The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.

James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.

Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.

"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.

"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.