This Is Me…Now: A Love Story review: JLo tells a powerful tale

To understand where multi-hyphenate superstar Jennifer Lopez is today, as her new film This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is about to start streaming on Prime Video, audiences need to know where she’s been. Two decades ago, Lopez suffered devastating heartache when her engagement to Oscar-winner Ben Affleck was abruptly called off. Their two-year courtship—which earned them the moniker “Bennifer” from fans and press—was heavily documented by paparazzi, and the ensuing media circus surrounding them eventually helped to sever their romantic ties.

While their relationship was forged in the fires of the cinematic dud Gigli, it birthed J.Lo’s under-heralded album This Is Me…Then, which turned out four hit singles and marked her brilliant artistic foray into dreamy R&B-style yacht pop bops. Her sonic love letter, dedicated to her Bostonian fiancée, remains a banging cultural artifact. Yet just as the album’s 20th anniversary crept close, a wonderful thing happened for Lopez, Affleck, and the rest of us who’ve waxed nostalgic for Bennifer’s hallmark era: the lovebirds rekindled their romance and finally made it to the altar. Twice.

Their reunification inspired La Lopez—ever the unapologetic romantic—to creatively reflect upon her lifelong journey, discovering the healing power of self-love within the notes and lyrics of a sequel album and accompanying music video experience, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story. She teams up with director Dave Meyers and co-writer Matt Walton (working from a story by Lopez, Meyers, and Chris Shafer) to re-imagine her lovelorn adventures as a fantastical, over-the-top genre mashup. The result is a genuinely moving, absurdist autobiography of a dynamic persona in flux that’s as campy as it is charming, ridiculous as it is rapturous, preposterous as it is profound.

The filmmakers manifest an overarching story in which Lopez, as the Artist, is engaged in intensive psychotherapy sessions led by her Therapist (Fat Joe) that connect music video vignettes. A tribunal of celestial signs—the Zodiacal Counsel, which contains a cavalcade of celebrities, most notably Jane Fonda as a resolute Sagittarius, Post Malone as a flirty Leo, and Keke Palmer as a sassy Scorpio—also weighs in from the heavens with their vain attempts to align Lopez’s life. She also has a group of friends, who despite titles like “The Cynic,” “The Fighter,” and “The Quiet One,” don’t establish themselves as anything but a generic monolith. And in the background of all her travesties and travails is Rex Stone (Ben Affleck in a gloriously gonzo performance under heavy prosthetics and a bad wig), a cable news talking head providing a few nuggets of wisdom. Yes, it’s okay to giggle. Silliness acts as a gateway to sincerity.

She begins by sharing the Puerto Rican myth of star-crossed lovers Alida and Taroo, a.k.a. The Legend of the Hummingbird (the officially adopted animal ally of her romantic renaissance). It’s a love she’s sought to emulate—to little avail, as her paramours have all disappointed since her one true love crashed and vanished years earlier. If our beloved “Jenny from the Block” had to psychologically disassociate to bring us this bonkers, beautifully rhapsodic odyssey, balancing personal revelations with professional breakthroughs, then we are truly the victors.

Scenarios shared with her therapeutic confidant range from surreal and metaphoric to clear-eyed. The propulsive ferocity behind these musical sequences is potent, containing varying degrees of poignancy. The upbeat, steampunk-adjacent number “Hearts and Flowers” casts her as a fearless factory worker dancing with people clad in hazmat suits as she fights to keep a mechanical heart fueled by fresh rose petals beating. “Rebound” has her and an abusive ex tethered together in a toxic tango, ending with her walking on broken glass (eat your heart out, Annie Lennox).

“Can’t Get Enough,” a peppy, sweet-hearted romcom-esque ditty in which she cheekily lampoons her trio of weddings (Dancing With The Stars’ Derek Hough noticeably playing the part of ex-hubs/dancer Chris Judd), and “Broken Like Me,” a gutting, introspective ballad set in a self-help group, ditch the previous songs’ heavy CGI for a practical visual aesthetic and grounded emotional resonance. Luther Brown, Parris Goebel, Tessandra Chavez, and Sienna Lalau’s choreography earns high marks throughout, but particularly in these two immersive set pieces as the dancers’ synchronized rhythmic movements are, respectively, joyously infectious and poetically expressive.

As Steven Spielberg did with The Fabelmans, returning to childhood to work through the complex feelings that formed his identity, Lopez does too as the architect of her own biography in the portion featuring the title track, confronted by her young self (Bella Gagliano) in her old Bronx neighborhood. That’s not to say she’s entirely self-aware. There’s a Marie Antoinette-ish correlation to be made as she sobs over The Way We Were on her custom Gucci couch in a multimillion-dollar Malibu mansion. She cries in therapy, rationalizing self-sabotaging behavior while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Endangered Species.” Still, she wins us back again and again with compelling empathy, as heartache is still heartache.

Lopez showcases strength and vulnerability more than ever before in this deeply personalized work of artistic bravura. She opens her heart in “Hummingbird,” a Singing In The Rain-esque pas de deux with a hummingbird on a rainy evening, and in “Midnight Trip To Vegas,” which was lyrically inspired by the steadfast sweethearts’ Sin City nuptials, but plays like she’s reveling in a fever dream combo of Burning Man, Coachella, and a P. Diddy Hamptons party. Switching up the order of the album tracks provides an engrossing storyline—though not all the songs appear to have warranted the big screen treatment. “Mad In Love With Ya,” “This Time Around,” and “Not Going Anywhere” are relegated to the end credits scroll.

This Is Me…Now: A Love Story’s heightened reality and authentic artifice will most likely connect best with J. Lo’s passionate fan base. However, anyone who clicks play (even the haters she sings about on “This Time Around”) to spend an hour in her headspace will see that she and Meyers have gifted us with a gem, filled with catchy, unabashedly sentimental songs centered on never giving up on love. It’s the perfect happy ending for a woman innovatively voicing her creative catharsis through sound and vision.

This Is Me…Now: A Love Story streams on Prime Video starting February 16