Film

A bit of advice for aspiring musicians: Heroin is bad. Cocaine is bad. Not showing up for your wedding because you’re too zonked to get out of bed is bad. At times, this biopic of pioneering salsa singer Héctor Lavoe (Anthony) seems less like a movie than a danceable 1980s for Dummies: The Partnership for a Drug-Free America commercial gives way to an antihandgun PSA before segueing into an earnest plea for HIV testing.

Taking the name Lavoe, or “the voice,” El Cantante’s central figure never emerges as anything more than that. Judging from the film, his only activities from the early ’70s through the late ’80s were singing, screwing, snorting and shooting up. A walking pair of aviator shades, Anthony is at least a marginally more charismatic presence than Lopez, who—as Lavoe’s long-suffering wife, Puchi—advances the narrative through pseudodocumentary interviews. El Cantante provides no insight into what apparently made its subject a revelatory figure. It’s hard to imagine a biopic pulling off a bigger insult than that.