Do you remember when Avatar was released in theaters, and audience members reportedly experienced depression after they saw it? Viewers had to leave Pandora and return to their lives on Earth outside of the theater, and it made them so miserable that they formed an entire online community just for support. That’s precisely how I feel about the fantastical world that Jennifer Lopez has crafted in This Is Me…Now: A Love Story (streaming Feb. 16 on Prime Video). Romance rules in Lopez’s chimeric version of Earth, and follies of the human heart can have such cataclysmic results that they may end the world as we know it.
Released in conjunction with her first studio album in a decade—which shares the film’s title, minus its post-colon descriptor—This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is a Marvel-grade cinematic spectacle that matches the album’s extravagant emotional base. It’s a long-form extension of the record and a standalone work by Lopez; think Beyoncé’s Lemonade film for ivory tower romantics. But this isn’t merely a series of music videos, strung together with a weak narrative thread. The movie is an introspective look at Lopez’s public life, tabloid-favorite romances, and her deepest desires, thrust through an autofictional lens and abstracted into her version of Homer’s The Odyssey. That is to say: It’s exactly as gloriously tacky as its trailer makes it out to be.
But there is something to be said about the kind of amber-colored cheese that J.Lo is trading here. It’s impressively effective, largely because Lopez is so unashamed. She’s waving her arms at us, desperate to show us how her heart stays pinned to her sleeve no matter how furiously she gestures about. She implores us to understand how good an open heart can feel. This Is Me…Now: A Love Story works because of its total earnestness. It’s so preposterously committed to its vision that you cannot help but be enthralled, not so much lured into its dreamscapes but swept away by them. Under Lopez’s command, the traditional notions of good and bad fly out the window—there is only more. What else could we expect from Jennifer Lopez, our foremost romantic maximalist, but a wackadoo portrait of the insatiable heart?
From the moment it begins, we are but pawns in Lopez’s game, putty in hands moisturized with her J.Lo Beauty brand hydrating body cream. Lopez explains the Puerto Rican myth of Alida and Taroo, a story about a forbidden romance that ends with Alida being turned into a beautiful red flower, and her lover Taroo a hummingbird, determined to find Alida again even if it takes him a lifetime. Lopez notes that she’s seen these characters in flowers and birds all of her life, always longing to find the same kind of mythic romance from the great folktales. In her dreams, she experiences these grandiose feelings through abstract metaphors: Motorcycle crashes, tortured romances, and a giant steampunk heart that will destroy the world if it isn’t fed a steady stream of rose petals.
These dream sequences feel outrageous at their start, but Lopez and director Dave Meyers are experts when it comes to crafting enormous visual landscapes that meet the demands of a broken heart. The CGI of Lopez’s mind palace is magnificently rendered, so confident in its place in the film that it’s hard to imagine the superstar being able to get her point across without it. There are entire worlds here, saturated with color and twisting like labyrinths. Where most modern filmmaking uses CGI to its detriment, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story enhances its story with digital aid. Much like the Resident Evil movie franchise or 2004’s Catwoman, the film succeeds because it allows the computer-generated effects to look like a video game, and not a digitally enhanced version of real life. Their unabashed inclusion makes the film all the more majestic.
This is a rollercoaster ride through J.Lo’s public history, and it feels like one too. This Is Me…Now: A Love Story clocks in at just 65 minutes. But that brisk pace keeps the viewer engaged, unable to free themselves from the VFX bog that’s rapidly absorbing any remaining misgivings. Lopez speaks to her therapist (Fat Joe) about her marriages, missed connections, and lost loves as if they are being dictated by the cosmos. In her mind, maybe they are. An all-star Zodialogical Council presides over Jennifer from the stars, leading her toward self-actualization. Jane Fonda, Keke Palmer, Kim Petras, Post Malone, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sofía Vergara, and more—most playing their own star signs (I checked)—opine Lopez’s bad decisions, wondering why she can’t see that real love is written in the stars.
This is one big way of saying, “Ben Affleck was my true love all along,” a message that the movie eventually gets to, just not so plainly. Affleck, who co-wrote the film along with Lopez and Matt Walton, appears in the film as a newscaster decrying the state of the world. He and the Zodialogical Council are shoehorned into the movie for laughs, and do earn a few—Keke Palmer doing J.Lo song references and Maya Angelou impressions are high points. But it’s Lopez who’s the real draw here. She’s genuinely enjoyable as she pokes some meta fun at addiction to romance, and other times quite moving. A third-act conversation with her childhood self is touching, and creates the suspicion that maybe Lopez isn’t just a really good actor; maybe she’s actually able to convince herself that every part she plays is her.
After all, that level of self-importance would be in line with what Lopez is getting at here. This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is a narcissist’s dream, a $20 million celebration of celebrity and its foibles. But some types of vanity projects resonate because they are so completely that of their creator, and Lopez’s film is one of them. For my money, it reveals something much more true and relatable about her than her 2022 documentary Halftime ever did: She loves love. What could be more universal than being desperate to find your other half?
Lopez’s decision to present the layers of that search as conceptually as possible is a stroke of nutty genius. Her friends in the film do not have names, but rather, archetypes: The Lover, The Cynic, The Realist, and so on. The musical sequences—which are shot and choreographed better than any movie musical I’ve seen in a decade—are rife with metaphors. Lopez’s giant estate looks more like a panopticon than a house. As she lies around, watching The Way We Were over and over following her highly scrutinized breakups, she keenly evokes a recent Doja Cat lyric: “It’s so lonely in my mansion.”
It all fits together, glued in place by the lovelorn lyrics and thumping beats found on her new album. Seeing how Lopez adapts the music for the movie is part of the draw, but only part. The artistic merit here is low; this isn’t Lemonade, nor should it be. Lopez is aiming for relatable, not insightful. By doing this, she becomes the everywoman, an antithesis of Beyoncé’s unattainable perfection.
This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is gleefully messy, just like love so often is. Whether that frenetic chaos is intentional or not doesn’t matter when it feels so apt for the story. Jennifer Lopez is Eros, Prime Video’s god of love, sex, and desire. Her yearning has taken her to places where less steadfast lovers wouldn’t go without a gun. After this wild ride, no broken heart shall prosper. Pessimistic aromanticism is the enemy, and she alone has the power to defeat it.
