All-encompassing drama.

At once a sexy soap opera, at times lurid and bathetic, and also a gritty cautionary tale made by a filmmaker honest enough to have it both ways.

When Circuit is on its game it's very telling and where it's at its best is detailing just how difficult it is for men so hedonistically self-involved to love one another.

Shafer (himself a former Playgirl centerfold) never quite manages the incisive social critique his story seems to require.

With its thumping soundtrack, absence of body hair and a camera that practically pants over every bulge, curve and crack of the male form, the film is really closer to porn than a serious critique of what's wrong with this increasingly pervasive aspect of gay culture.

If anyone wants to watch naked men in the shower, naked men doing erotic dancing, naked men in bed and almost-naked men pumping iron, this is the film to see.

It makes the viewer wonder whether Circuit would have been stronger as a documentary instead of the well-intentioned, overlong, intermittently entertaining but flawed feature that it is.

There is a real subject here, and it is handled with intelligence and care.

As slick and attractive as its cast. But the movie gets away from Shafer.

Mostly, Shafer and co-writer Gregory Hinton lack a strong-minded viewpoint, or a sense of humor, about a world in which the DJ has the power to unify, if only for a night, men of godlike beauty and the mortals who worship them.

The movie's strongest draw is its kitsch value -- along with a wisecracking Bruce Vilanch, the cast includes '80s TV refugees Jm J. Bullock ("Too Close for Comfort") and the Greatest American Hero himself, William Katt.

Like ''Showgirls'' and ''Glitter,'' the most entertaining moments here are unintentional.

Dirk Shafer's feature doesn't offer much in terms of plot or acting. But it does have oodles of hunky male bodies. The choice is yours.

It's too bad Shafer spent his budget making a fiction feature instead of just shooting a documentary about the scene. So much of the film is melodramatic kitsch, but there's still a movie in here.