THIS IS ME… NOW: A LOVE STORY -- J-Lo’s Album Film is a Wild Ride

Review by Cole Groth

Jennifer Lopez is ready to bare it all on her ninth album. After her recent marriage to Ben Affleck, she's ready to tell everyone the "greatest story never told" with an Amazon Prime subscription in This is Me… Now: A Love Story, a narrative version of the album of the same name. To fans of the pop icon, this serves as a love letter to you. It's a sweeping and audacious story of Lopez's hopeless romanticism and deserves praise for being such a wild vision. It's a little full of itself at times and sometimes so bizarre that it verges on insanity, but it is an ultimately interesting journey worthy of a watch.

This Is Me… Now is what the title promises: Jennifer Lopez's story of her life… so far. Here, she plays a fictional version of herself as a young woman navigating her life as a former love addict who, after three divorces, finds herself no longer to love. We navigate between reality and fantasy as the film crosses from Earth to the celebrity-filled Zodiac council, who are trying to make her fall in love again. It's an inspired story that moves through the album fairly well.

The album itself, at least shown in the film, is fine. This isn't exactly the place to review albums, so I'll refrain from covering that here, but none of the songs are particularly noteworthy. There's plenty of great choreography for each sequence, and while each could serve as a pretty good music video, they're brought down overall because they were all produced simultaneously.

Now, if you expected some sort of grounded story of love, prepare to be slapped in the face with one of the most ridiculous movies of all time. It's such a viscerally strange experience that ultimately works more than it doesn't. One second, Lopez is sitting in a sterile therapist's office. The next, we're sitting in the Zodiac council chamber with Trevor Noah, Post Malone, Keke Palmer, Sofia Vergara, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jane Fonda, and Kim Petras hitting on each other and talking about star signs to justify why Lopez keeps getting engaged. So much of the film is made up of CGI straight from a Robert Rodriguez movie, and it honestly adds a lot of charm to it. It's campy in a way that is actually worthy of praise.

Now, one of the fundamentally difficult things about watching a story about Lopez's life is that through all of her emotional struggles, she's clearly this obscenely wealthy woman. This obviously isn't supposed to be a relatable story, but it gets especially strange as we watch Lopez mouth along to The Way We Were on her weirdly CGI-ed television while lounging in a three-story megamansion. It creates this discordance between fans of Lopez and regular human beings. Fans of hers will understand the struggle and enjoy it because it's uniquely her story, but people who aren't obsessed with her work will find some of this eye-rolling.

At only 65 minutes long (more like 55 because the credits are obscenely long), This Is Me… Now is worthy of a watch for its sheer audacity. It's not the best musical and could use lots more work to be more appealing from an auditory and visual perspective, but Lopez has created something pretty special here. If one of the biggest singers of all time can make a movie look this impressively weird, hopefully, this will encourage others to do the same. Maybe Taylor Swift's upcoming movie will be some gonzo science fiction thriller instead of a grounded drama.

This Is Me… Now: A Love Story releases on Amazon Prime on February 16th.

Rating: 3/5