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 I promise not to begin every film review this one-dose summer with the following lament, but: my goodness, I wish that I could have watched In the Heights in a crowded movie theatre. A blindingly bright burst of unabashed romanticism powered in equal parts by the showtune-drenched childhood dreams of Lin-Manuel Miranda and several too many cups of café con leche, the new musical is explicitly designed to be projected on the largest screen possible, paced with enough breaks for spontaneous audience-in-the-aisle applause.

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Watching the film at home – whether it’s because most cinemas are closed in Canada, or because you’d just rather stream HBO Max in the U.S. Than step inside a multiplex – seems like a special kind of insult to Miranda, director Jon M. Chu and everyone else here who sing and dance and emote themselves to the absolute brink of exhaustion.

But (yes, another “but”): better to see In the Heights at home then not at all. Mostly.

Anthony Ramos in a scene from In the Heights.

Macall Polay/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP

A generous, bursting-at-the-seams adaptation of Miranda’s pre-Hamilton Broadway hit – with a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes, who also wrote the screenplay – In the Heights is determined at every corner to win you over. Sometimes by the sheer magnetism of its performers and its eye-popping choreography. Sometimes by the sheer force of Chu’s more-more-more approach. After almost 2½ hours, it’s like being punched in the face by a jazz hand.

Its plot is ridiculously, even insultingly, simple: young bodega operator Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) is dreaming of leaving New York’s Washington Heights for the simple, sunny pleasures of the Dominican Republic. Complicating matters are finances, the fashion-industry dreams of love interest Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) and the general guilt that comes with leaving a neighbourhood on the cusp of gentrification.

You Don’t Stop Dancing When You Get Old You Get Old When You Stop Dancing Poster

On the sidelines are a host of local characters whose fates you either become invested in – like Usnavi’s buddy Benny (Corey Hawkins), a taxi dispatcher who dreams of owning his own car service, or Benny’s boss Kevin (Jimmy Smits), who is bankrupting himself to send his daughter to Stanford – or forget about midway. Oh, and Miranda himself is here, too, in a small role as Piragua Guy, wisely deciding that he’s far too old to play Usnavi as he did back on Broadway more than a decade ago. (In a full-circle twist, Ramos played Miranda’s son in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton.)

 

 

 

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