Jennifer Lopez’s Explores Her Public History in a Personal, Musical Rom-Com
DIRECTOR: DAVE MEYERS/2024
Jennifer Lopez is a good singer, musician, and actress. She’s a great dancer, fashion icon, and famous person.
Even though This Is Me… Now: A Love Story is meant to accompany her newest album, she knows her strengths. This 65-minute highlight reel of her 13-track, 44-minute album is ready for the heyday of MTV, leading with the visuals. Like Beyoncé’s 65-minute film based on the 13-track, 49-minute album Lemonade, she focuses her energy on the choreography, costume choices, and her interaction with her own celebrity. Of course, comparing This Is Me to any of Queen Bey’s canon is generous, but formally and thematically, they have more in common than you’d expect.
Like Lemonade, Lopez’s newest release is deeply autobiographical, preceded in theaters by a message to the audience declaring this is the first time she’s told her own story. Inevitably, the Internet will speculate which moments allude to moments with Marc Anthony and Alex Rodriguez, but This Is Me doesn’t read like a tabloid spilling the deets of her many high-profile relationships or reveal intimate footage. Instead, her memoir is told with broad factual strokes accented by precise emotions. A friend noted this movie’s trailer appears “unhinged,” which is perhaps the more succinct version of Lopez’s description: a “surrealistic magical odyssey.” We sit through several therapy sessions with her—with repeat collaborator Fat Joe playing her therapist—as she works through the baggage of past relationships. She meets and dances with representations of her former lovers, her younger self, and competing perspectives on love. They perform in a factory powering her dying heart, a wedding chapel, a glass house, and a recreation of the rainy streets Gene Kelly sloshed through in Singin’ in the Rain.
This film reunites her with director Dave Meyers, who has been directing music videos since the late ‘90s, including several of her big hits in the ‘00s. The Old Hollywood fan in me wishes her Gene Kelly homage would have manifested an editing style more akin to to the long takes that kept his routines the star of his films, but collaborating with Meyers creates a natural segue into her own history. This Is Me opens with a motorcycle ride into her past like in the 2001 “I’m Real” video he directed. Celebrity cameos abound, including her Monster-in-Law co-star Jane Fonda. And, yes, real-life partner Ben Affleck is here, and not just in inspiring this sequel album to the record he inspired in 2002.
Tonally, This Is Me operates at the same energy as Lopez’s romantic comedies: sincere, down-to-earth, and cheesy. If, like me, you’ve watched Maid in Manhattan, Marry Me, and Second Act more than once, this cheese factor is no problem—it’s part of their rewatchability. In This Is Me, she is the heroine of her own rom-com, though it’s less about falling for Affleck than for herself. She has publicly declared, “I’m so monogamous it’s stupid,” but she knows we’ve already seen her fall in and out and in love again with Affleck in the tabloids, the “Jenny from the Block” music video, and, yes, Gigli. (The only thing those of us rooting for Bennifer can defend in that movie is their chemistry.) The revelatory part of This Is Me is her vulnerability 30 years into her career, such as when “Rebound” dives into experiences with abusive partners. (Though this release comes on the heels of allegations against past paramour Diddy, there’s no evidence he’s the inspiration for the track.) The primary thread running through the film, though, is that she is the author of many of her own problems, so desperate to be loved she jumps into relationships because she can’t be alone with herself.
When she wants to, Lopez can hold her own in projects seeking critical acclaim, but This Is Me shows no interest in earning that kind of attention. At its most memorable, it’s a stylistic fever dream filled with oversized floral arrangements, haute couture gowns, and jokes about Vanderpump Rules. It may not be Lemonade, but it’s no lemon.