RENT (2005) is an American musical drama film that is an adaptation of the Broadway musical based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera La bohème. The film is centered around the lives of eight New Yorkers: Mark Cohen, a struggling filmmaker, Roger Davis, an HIV-positive musician, Mimi Marquez, an HIV-positive heroin addict and stripper, Tom Collins, an anarchist professor, Angel Schunard, an HIV-positive transgender woman, Maureen Johnson, a bisexual performance artist, Joanne Jefferson, a lesbian Harvard-educated lawyer, and Benny Coffin III, the sellout. It features the bohemian lifestyle of the first seven aforementioned characters, dealing with with their struggles with money, substance abuse, sexuality, and the AIDS crisis.

Instead of the commercial trailer, I decided to use the “La Vie Bohème” scene as I feel that it captures the essence of the film more effectively:

In this film, Rosario Dawson plays Mimi Marquez, one of the lead female characters. Mimi Marquez is a HIV-positive exotic dancer at the Cat Scratch Club who is addicted to heroin. She is  very close to poverty due to her lack of education and low-paying job. Although she is technically a lead female role, her story in this film is mostly centered around her relationship with Roger:

Their on-again-off-again relationship is plagued by the fact that she is HIV-positive, but in the end, they end up together. Little insight is given into Mimi’s background, but it is evident that personality-wise, she is flirty, moody, but passionate about what she loves. She is motherly towards her friends despite the fact that she is the youngest in the group; she is only nineteen years old. While Mimi’s last name indicates a Latinx heritage, like Ruby in Kids, there is no direct referral to Dawson’s Afro-Latina heritage with this character.