A fearless Lopez, an electrifying Anthony

Like the sonnet, the modern musical biopic opposes the mortality of man with the immortality of song. And whether the subject is a jazzman (Bird), pop singer (Ray), or chanteuse (La Vie en Rose), the rhythms and rules of the musical biopic are nearly as codified as those of a sonnet, too. Almost inevitably the biopic subject is a meteor and the narrative suspense is, will it light up the sky or crash to earth?

El Cantante (The Singer), Leon Ichaso's haunting portrait of salsa king Héctor Lavoe, is a biopic of the second kind. It's a soaring, crashing, blazing affair with pyrotechnic performances by real-life spouses Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez as Lavoe and his wife, Puchi. Like a plane disaster, it holds you in thrall of ¡ay, Dios mio! drama.

Directed with palpable passion and terrific period feel by Ichaso, El Cantante has camerawork and editing that move with the 4/4 rhythm of salsa, upbeat even when the drama grows downbeat. The Cuba-born director's Hendrix and Piñero were about similarly self-destructive personalities, and his underknown Crossover Dreams (1985) was likewise set in the salsa clubs of Latin Manhattan.

Ichaso frames the film with black-and-white footage of Puchi (a deglamorized Lopez) reflecting on her tempestuous marriage with the Puerto Rico-born salsero. As the film proceeds it emerges that Puchi, a Lavoe adorer who becomes his keeper and ultimately his enabler, is a most unreliable narrator.

To paraphrase the title of an Off-Broadway play about the singer, the question haunting El Cantante is: What killed Héctor Lavoe?

Was it the disapproval of his musician father, who never forgave his son for leaving Ponce for Manhattan in 1963? The guilt of abandoning a son born out of wedlock when he married Puchi, at the time pregnant with his second son? The melancholy of the exile homesick for his native country, unable to fully inhabit his adopted land? The marriage to a wife who became his warden and drug supplier? Or was it the heroin?