It might not have scored her the Oscar nomination she deserved (and hungered for) but Jennifer Lopez’s canny, all-guns-blazing performance in Hustlers was still a validating win for an actor, and a fanbase, who sorely needed one. Lopez had been the best thing in a cascade of increasingly middling movies, her career defined by the inability to take a risk, to be unlikable or messy or inelegant, and so the star’s rougher, more interesting edges had been sanded down to nothing.
Her latest project is, in a way, all risk, something that’s become front and centre of her recent press tour, when Lopez revealed that her $20m big bet – a hokey, hard-to-define cinematic accompaniment to her new album – is self-funded. While it might not feel like money well spent from afar (this is surely not a film intended for a wide audience), it’s less about what we get from watching it and more about what she seems to have got from making and co-writing it. This would usually be how one describes the worst kind of vanity project and while there are certainly a lot of markers here, the whole endeavour is far too harmless and far too proudly sentimental to fully deserve such a traditionally mean-spirited definition.
This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is a lot of things. It’s part visual album, part “warts-and-all” autobiography, part animated Puerto Rican myth, part sci-fi epic, part celebrity satire and part self-help exercise. It’s inarguably too many parts to make something that feels whole, a chaotic and rushed journey through the mind of a megastar who prefers to keep her real self in the shade (her staggeringly candid, yet briefly ruinous, Movieline interview from 1998 remains the most honest and funny representation of her we’ve ever seen). Lopez plays herself as she glides from therapy sessions with Fat Joe (lol), hangouts with her beautiful yet concerned friends, a string of unsuccessful relationships and musical sequences that riff on everything from Silo to Cloud Atlas to Singin’ in the Rain. All of this is overseen by the Zodiac Council, watching and judging from above, allowing for definitely-not-shot-in-the-same-room cameos from Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Keke Palmer and Trevor Noah among others. We hear new songs from her album, a sequel to 2002’s This Is Me … Then, and we allegedly learn more about Lopez’s thoughts, fears and anxieties in an on-her-terms tell-all that really doesn’t tell us all that much.
Lopez’s 2022 doc Halftime, hinged on the lead-up to her Super Bowl performance, was one of the more entertaining pop star docs of late. It was still airbrushed and tightly micromanaged of course, but gave just about enough reality for us to feel as if the walls had been briefly lowered, if only by the smallest of whiskers. The closest we get here is Lopez admitting she loves too hard and too much (OK), the film existing for the most part because of her reunion with Ben Affleck, who appears as a Fox News-adjacent pundit Rex Stone (OK!), her real-life happy ending requiring an on-screen equivalent. What’s positioned as sly self-awareness is mostly just a recital of facts – Lopez has been married four times, Lopez is a serial monogamist, Lopez is addicted to romance etc.
It’s not the act of raw honesty it thinks it is and it’s certainly not a successful visual album; Lopez’s new songs all sound hopelessly middle-of-the-road – over-produced and under-written, stuck in the early 2000s, a time when her music did have a genuine, exciting electricity. The visuals are similarly dated, summoning the spirit of the sorts of synthetic pop and R&B videos that would litter TRL at the time, green-screened to the point of surreality, a strange place to stay for longer than three minutes, let alone over an hour. The movie exists in a world not of our own, as if Lopez has died and this is what heaven would be for her, digital over-perfection defining a film that’s supposed to be about embracing harsh truths.
There are bizarre pleasures to be had along the way – Lopez watching The Way We Were and mouthing every word of dialogue uttered by her self-confessed idol; Lopez turning a love addicts therapy session managed by Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci into a dance sequence; Lopez concocting an action sequence around a giant steampunk version of her heart as it’s dangerously low on petals; Post Malone flirting with Jane Fonda – but never enough to turn the film into the bizarro trainwreck the trailer might have suggested. It’s not really much of anything in the end, and feels most like a stitched together collection of pre-filmed awards show bits, working best as yet more proof of Lopez’s considerable screen magnetism. She’s a joy to watch, a pro at elevating something that should be beneath her, even when it has come from her own hand. If this is Lopez as she is now, willing to take a certain kind of risk, then let’s hope she’s willing to take more.
This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is on Amazon Prime on 16 February
