MOVIE REVIEW : To Be Young, Vital and : Dying of AIDS : ‘Silverlake Life’ spares no feelings in chronicling the extraordinarily moving story of two HIV-positive men.

If you know anything about “Silverlake Life: The View From Here,” you will be tempted to think you know it all, and you will be wrong. An extraordinarily moving documentary compiled from the video diary of two Los Angeles gay men who died of AIDS, it sounds more solemnly predictable, more like a fussy good deed, than it turns out to be.

Yes, “Silverlake Life” (at the Vista in Hollywood) is inescapably a story of deterioration and decay, but it is also a poem to the pleasures of life, a witty, at times funny film that is as much about the meaning and the charms of love and lasting relationships as about the agonies of a horrific death.

These qualities come directly from the warm and clever personalities of the two men who began the film, Tom Joslin and Mark Massi. Joslin, who taught film at USC and elsewhere and counted documentarians Ken Burns and Rob Epstein among his students, began the diaries when Massi was diagnosed as HIV-positive. When Joslin himself began to deteriorate faster, Massi took over the camera and the film was finally finished by another of Joslin’s students, co-director Peter Friedman.

Lovers and companions for 22 years, Joslin and Massi were a remarkable couple. Articulate, playful, and above all absolutely candid, they were secure enough in themselves to hold nothing back from the camera, and their personableness and accessibility are essential in involving us in their ordeal.

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Providing an extra perspective is that, 15 years earlier, Joslin had made their relationship the subject of a PBS-TV documentary called “Blackstar: The Autobiography of a Close Friend.” To see the two men when they were young and vital, to hear Joslin’s parents express the pain they felt at their son’s public homosexuality, adds an almost inexpressible poignancy to the joint onset of AIDS.

The couple’s troubles started small, and it is the small moments that create the film’s most lasting impact. Joslin worn out by an attempt to pry a plastic bin loose from a market stack, commenting “What a way to live. What a way to die.” Joslin furious in a car, on the verge of tears of frustration and exhaustion while Massi squeezes one more errand into the day. And Joslin walking with difficulty in the Huntington cactus garden, archly wondering if he and Massi will have the strength to pass up an upcoming bench in “a brave effort of physical dynamism.”

Make no mistake, though, “Silverlake Life” does not avoid the awful physical details of Joslin and Massi’s condition, does not flinch from showing the ravages of KS lesions and even the shock of death. Carefully and with premeditation, it denies the viewer any safe distance, any place to run or to hide.

Yet more than balancing these at times unwatchable horrors are numerous moments of warmth and love, things like a tender kiss from Massi that causes a feeble, emaciated Joslin to smile at the camera and say, “I bet you people don’t get these.” Nothing in fact underlines the plague nature of AIDS as much as seeing these two lovers simultaneously dying in the prime of life from the same relentless disease.

What is perhaps most unexpected and most moving about “Silverlake Life” is the unmistakable feeling that what mattered to both men every bit as much as their battle to stay alive was the struggle to make the world in general and Joslin’s family in particular understand how committed to and in love with each other they were.

And though it is sad to have to say so, at a time when so much public effort and energy has gone into demonizing homosexuality, “Silverlake Life’s” unshakable emphasis on its protagonists’ humanity is a critical counterweight. Difficult as this film is to watch at times, no one who sees it through to its unexpectedly buoyant final scene will regret the time spent or be unchanged by the experience.

‘Silverlake Life: The View From Here’

Produced in association with Channel Four Television and J.P. Weiner Productions, Inc. Released by Zeitgeist Films. Produced and directed by Tom Joslin, Peter Friedman. Co-producers Doug Block, Jane Weiner. Cinematography Tom Joslin, Mark Massi, Elaine Mayes, Peter Friedman. Editor Peter Friedman. Music Lucia Hwong. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Times rated: Adult.