TV Reviews : ‘Daybreak’ an Imaginative, Pointed Political Allegory

“Daybreak” (at 8 tonight on HBO) is a bleakly gripping futuristic drama in which victims of an AIDS-like plague are furtively quarantined in squalid camps on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Once isolated, they are treated like lepers and never seen again.

The movie is a terrific directorial debut for Stephen Tolkin, who has also written a script loaded with ideas dealing with the texture of a society that’s totally cleansed itself of drugs and crime at the expense of freedom.

Its interracial co-stars, Moira Kelly and Cuba Gooding Jr., spark the right chemistry as young urban resistance fighters who become lovers despite the fact one of them comes to be branded on the chest with the dreaded tattoo “P” (for plague positive).

The portrayal of squalor in a near-future New York will remind moviegoers a lot of John Carpenter’s “Escape From New York,” and “Daybreak’s” repressive new millennium, complete with euphemisms like “Operation Helping Hand,” will certainly recall George Orwell’s “1984.”

Loosely adapted from the play “Beirut” by the late Alan Bowne (which was staged in Hollywood in 1987 at the Matrix and in 1991 at the igLoo), Tolkin has intelligently exploited the resources of cinema, wisely broadening the play’s narrow, obsessive love story into a wider, far more socially pointed political allegory.

Vivid supporting performances enliven the plot, notably Martha Plimpton’s jittery blonde whose personal betrayal triggers chaos, and Amir Williams’ rebel lookout who’s an “Our Gang” look-alike with a walkie-talkie and binoculars to spy on approaching police cars from tenement rooftops.

It’s bracing to see such imaginative storytelling on TV. But the production is not seamless. The first half of the show races along like a storm, but the concluding scenes, focused as they are on the two lovers and their anguished dilemma, cannot sustain the movie’s propulsive opening.