Mr. and Mrs. J-Lo's vanity project "El Cantante" has tin ear

Recent entries into the musical-biopic genre such as "Ray" and "Walk the Line" have raised the bar with superb performances and original scripts. Although tremendous effort was expended to make "El Cantante" an experience as engaging as those that brought us closer to the life and work of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, this story of noted Latin pop phenomenon Hector Lavoe can't compete on the same level.

Press materials describe this vanity project from Jennifer Lopez and her husband, Marc Anthony, as a labor of love, but love isn't enough to enhance the performances or prevent the narrative from being derivative and poorly structured.

Anthony plays Lavoe, who moved from his native Puerto Rico to New York in 1963. There, he quickly became a sensation in a new Latin pop scene that blended elements of jazz, rock, merengue, samba and other Latin styles into what was dubbed salsa. For a few decades he was king, even while ingesting massive amount of drugs. He died in 1993, an indeterminate time after a dirty heroin needle infected him with HIV.

Anthony's singing is great, but as hard as he tries, he simply doesn't have leading-man chops. As Lavoe's wife, Puchi, Lopez is brassy and loud. Unfortunately, she shows little modulation whether she's in loving-wife or hating-wife mode.

The scenes depicting Lavoe's entree into the fold of Fania Records (which would become synonymous with salsa) and his rapid rise with bandleader Willie Colon (John Ortiz) in New York, then across the world's stage, are the movie's best. In fact, all the musical sequences are wildly energetic.

But before the movie settles into its montage-heavy story of rise, plateau, fall, comeback and ultimate descent, it opens with a disrupting blow-by-blow account of a typical incident during Lavoe's peak in the early '80s. Puchi drags him out of a decrepit shooting gallery, feeds him some wake-up cocaine and gussies him up in the back of a limo on the way to a big New York gig for which he is already late. Still, his talent is such that he pulls off the show for throngs of adoring fans. And so it goes.

Another distraction that cuts in and out is vérité-style black-and-white footage of Puchi/Lopez being interviewed by a "documentary" crew some time after Lavoe's death. This jarring behind-the-music technique makes the vignettes of Lavoe's life even more disjointed and difficult to follow.

Director Leon Ichaso's grasp of his actors and story threads that lead nowhere is thin. "El Cantante" has nerve but can't follow through on the edginess of its intentions.

Ted Fry: tedfry@hotmail.com