Javier Bardem garnered international acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (the first for a Spanish actor) as Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright Reinaldo Arenas. Based on Arenas’s memoir of the same name, director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat) presents an impressionistic view of Arenas’s life from finding early writing success in Cuba, leading him to then finding himself in a community of openly gay men in Havana, to fleeing for the United States after years of imprisonment under Castro’s regime and ultimately passing away in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen after years of struggling with AIDS.