The Public Theatre’s presentation of “John Cassavetes’ Husbands,” running as part of the Under the Radar festival, is a nearly verbatim, unabridged reproduction of a largely improvised movie.  Whatever the late great auteur’s feeling about the ‘I’-word (busily qualifying it with hours of workshopping and rehearsals, I imagine), the rhythms of his 1970 film, starring chums Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara along with himself, were tailored to the actors’ specific traits, talents, physicality and the natural chemistry (as well as, one imagines, sometime antipathy) between them.  Hang those same made-to-measure roles and lines on any other three—especially much younger—men and the fine craftsmanship of a middle-aged-boys-gone-wild story disappears in billowing excess.

For the richness of Cassavetes’s work came in his luxuriating in the squirrelly, raw moments blooming forth long after any sane director would have called “cut” — he not only threw broken, wounded people against one another at high velocity, he showed them flapping about, ever more broken, in the aftermath of the collision.  All of which demands performances and commitment from a cast not often found, well, anywhere.

That being said, the actors in director Doris Mirescu’s incarnation are all in.  In fact the moments of real electricity come, much as they do in the film, from Gus’s ferocious tenacity—to please, to terrify, to entertain.  Though in the movie these moments are the fruit of Cassavetes’s own charisma, in the play they come via actor Florin Penisoara’s ferocious approximation of Cassavetes.

Indeed the play wants so badly to be its source material, much of it is actually shot on camera and projected on a screen behind the set.  For at least a quarter of the three-hour run time the action is taking place outside the theatre with handheld cameras dogging the actors—down Lafayette, in and out of a cab, up and down back stairwells.  But, while it seems ridiculous to talk about self-awareness in the theatre, the actors stranded on stage watching the “multi-media adaptation” along with the audience make one yearn for the clean, uncooked presentation of Cassavetes’s original.  Because even if “Husbands” wasn’t the brutalist masterpiece of cinema’s ultimate sashimi chef (“Love Streams,” coincidentally, adapted from Cassavetes’s play, may take that honor),  its signature was so exact, so precise as to make any rough estimate feel irrelevant.

But still we reach the end, the bender done, the boys come home, and we must wonder what it was all about.  Loneliness?  Fear of death?

And we wonder how the creator of this film never stopped smiling.

“John Cassavetes’ Husbands” @ The Public Theatre through January 17th. 180 minutes with intermission. Dangerous Ground Productions. Conceived, Designed and Directed by Doris Mirescu. $15 tickets at publictheater.org or 212-967-7555 The Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street