J.Lo’s ‘This Is Me...Now’ Is a Masterful, 65-Minute Rebuttal to All the Doubters

Do you remember when Avatar was released in theaters, and audience members reportedly experienced depression after they saw it? Viewers had to leave Pandora and return to their lives on Earth outside of the theater, and it made them so miserable that they formed an entire online community just for support. That’s precisely how I feel about the fantastical world that Jennifer Lopez has crafted in This Is Me…Now: A Love Story (streaming Feb. 16 on Prime Video). Romance rules in Lopez’s chimeric version of Earth, and follies of the human heart can have such cataclysmic results that they may end the world as we know it.

Released in conjunction with her first studio album in a decade—which shares the film’s title, minus its post-colon descriptor—This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is a Marvel-grade cinematic spectacle that matches the album’s extravagant emotional base. It’s a long-form extension of the record and a standalone work by Lopez; think Beyoncé’s Lemonade film for ivory tower romantics. But this isn’t merely a series of music videos, strung together with a weak narrative thread. The movie is an introspective look at Lopez’s public life, tabloid-favorite romances, and her deepest desires, thrust through an autofictional lens and abstracted into her version of Homer’s The Odyssey. That is to say: It’s exactly as gloriously tacky as its trailer makes it out to be.

But there is something to be said about the kind of amber-colored cheese that J.Lo is trading here. It’s impressively effective, largely because Lopez is so unashamed. She’s waving her arms at us, desperate to show us how her heart stays pinned to her sleeve no matter how furiously she gestures about. She implores us to understand how good an open heart can feel. This Is Me…Now: A Love Story works because of its total earnestness. It’s so preposterously committed to its vision that you cannot help but be enthralled, not so much lured into its dreamscapes but swept away by them. Under Lopez’s command, the traditional notions of good and bad fly out the window—there is only more. What else could we expect from Jennifer Lopez, our foremost romantic maximalist, but a wackadoo portrait of the insatiable heart?

Read more at The Daily Beast.