Film

BPM (Beats per Minute)

Name: BPM (Beats per Minute)
Genre: Drama
Released: 2017
Cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel, Antoine Reinartz, Félix Maritaud

BPM follows ACT UP Paris activists in the early 1990s, arguing tactics in weekly meetings while burying friends faster than they can save them. It moves between combative debate, direct-action protests, and a tender central romance, building real collective urgency rather than martyrdom. The camera gets close, the club scenes give it a pulse. For anyone who wants activism shown as lived, exhausting, glorious work.

TMDb rating

7.7

If you liked this

How to Survive a Plague2012

The documentary record behind BPM's fiction: archival footage of ACT UP's American chapter storming the FDA and NIH, the actual faces and fury the film dramatizes decades later.

But Pure talking-heads-and-archive documentary structure, less immersive and cinematic than a dramatized film.

It's a Sin2021

London's version of the same decade, following a friend group through the AIDS crisis with warmth, humour and eventual devastation, and a phenomenal young cast.

But Centres friendship and coming-of-age more than organised activism, and its glossy soundtrack-driven style is more crowd-pleaser than BPM's rawness.

Dallas Buyers Club2013

A true story of underground drug smuggling to get unapproved AIDS medication to dying patients in Texas, propulsive and angry in its own scrappy way.

But Built around a straight, initially homophobic protagonist's redemption arc, which sidelines the gay community it depicts.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Pose2018

Same disease, same decade, a queer community fighting for survival - but staged through balls and family-of-choice glamour instead of activist meetings, trading direct action for spectacle without losing the stakes.

Ballroom culture in the same New York, the same devastating years, chosen family and vogueing as both refuge and resistance, with a groundbreaking trans cast.

But Multiple seasons and a glossier, more soap-operatic pace than BPM's meeting-room intensity, with plenty of melodrama.

Philadelphia1993

The film that brought the epidemic to a mainstream American audience via courtroom drama, with Tom Hanks in an Oscar-winning performance.

But Studio-safe and dated in its caution, a legal drama first and an activist story a distant second.

The Normal Heart2014

Larry Kramer's own furious history of early-80s New York, the founding of an activist movement told from inside the rage and grief.

But Adapted from a stage play and it shows, pitched at high melodrama throughout rather than BPM's cooler naturalism.

Angels in America2003

A sprawling, magical-realist miniseries about Reagan-era America and AIDS, stacked with an extraordinary cast and enormous ambition.

But Six hours long with fantastical, hallucinatory elements a world away from BPM's grounded realism.

Milk2008

Harvey Milk's biopic traces the gay rights organising that preceded and fed into the AIDS-era activism BPM depicts, with Sean Penn at his best.

But Set mostly before the epidemic, focused on electoral politics rather than direct action or crisis.

Pride2014

British LGBT activists team up with striking miners in a true story that captures the same joyous, scrappy coalition-building energy as BPM's collective.

But Much lighter and funnier in tone, a feel-good crowd-pleaser rather than a story about AIDS at all.

And the Band Played On1993

Traces the CDC's early, catastrophically slow response to AIDS, based on Randy Shilts's book, useful institutional counterpoint to BPM's grassroots view.

But Dated made-for-TV production values and a procedural, journalistic approach with less emotional intimacy.

Longtime Companion1989

The same historical moment seen from the other side of the Atlantic and made in real time rather than retrospect - mourning where BPM mobilises, a useful mirror for what the anger in BPM was reacting against.

Made while the epidemic was still unfolding with no end in sight, one of the first American films to treat AIDS as a shared ensemble tragedy rather than a single case study.

But Shoestring budget and dated filmmaking, quieter and more grief-stricken than angry, with none of BPM's activist momentum.

Rent2005no page yet

Tackles the identical crisis and the same defiance-in-the-face-of-death spirit, but proves the material can carry a completely different register - heightened, sung, melodramatic - without losing its urgency.

The film version of the Broadway musical, set in the same bohemian, plague-shadowed New York, singing love and mortality out loud with huge emotional swings.

But Sentimental and occasionally corny in that big musical-theatre way, tonally the opposite of BPM's restraint.