Two young men live together in a small apartment near a railway yard. They might be brothers, they might be lovers. The elder one (Yu Bo) has mental problems: he has the mind of a child, and needs a lot of care and attention. The younger one (Wang Guifeng) has physical problems: he is HIV-positive, and fears that he will soon die of some AIDS-related illness. This is deeply distressing for him, because he worries that the older man will be left alone and helpless when he`s gone. Although it uses some exterior locations (the railway yard, railway tracks), this is essentially a chamber piece for Cui`s two favourite actors. Yu Bo and Wang Guifeng are both from the acting course at Beijing Film Academy (Wang hasn`t yet graduated) and have become central figures in Cui`s explorations of present-day sexual politics and emotional conundrums. But they are also `stars`, in the same sense that the actors in Andy Warhol`s Factory films were stars, and [Refrain] is both a sad song of loss and a celebration of its actors` star qualities.