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La Bamba
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| Year: |
1987
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Director: |
Luis Valdez
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| Stars: |
Lou Diamond Phillips, Esai Morales, Rosanna DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña, Danielle von Zerneck, Joe Pantoliano, Rick Dees, Marshall Crenshaw, Howard Huntsberry, Brian Setzer, Daniel Valdez, Felipe Cantu, Eddie Frias, Mike Moroff, Geoffrey Rivas
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| Genre: |
Biopic, Music |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
North Carolina in 1957 and Richie Valenzuela (Lou Diamond Phillips) is working in an apricot grove with his mother, both of them poor Mexican-Americans struggling to get by. His half-brother Bob (Esai Morales) has just been released from prison and rides up to their makeshift home on his motorbike: Richie is delighted to see him, though their mother has reservations when he pulls out a wad of cash and tells them he's going to take them away from all this, not knowing where the money has come from. Then again, Richie has reservations when Bob sleeps with Rosie (Elizabeth Peña), the girl he had his eye on...
La Bamba, the film, was part of the eighties obsession with the fifties that spawned a number of nostalgic advertisements, music recordings, and films, this being one of them as it detailed the short life of rock and roll singer Ritchie Valens from his impoverished beginnings to his rocketing success which was tragically cut short on the fateful plane journey that claimed the life of Buddy Holly. This means, with the nature of the subject so well-known, that as with many a biopic with a famous ending you are waiting for Holly and the Big Bopper to show up and herald the tearjerking denouement, but premonition dreams aside writer and director Luis Valdez did not make that too much of an issue.
This was mainly because Ritchie's life story was not so well known outside of his records and his demise, so could be seen as fresh territory for filmmakers and audiences alike, even if it does rely on the usual clichés of such efforts, not that there was anything that could be done about that. Valdez was lucky to get Phillips to play his Valens, who with his chiselled cheekbones and lean good looks certainly came across as right for the role, well, right unless you'd ever seen the real Valens in action, in which case you'd wonder why he'd lost all that weight, grown a few inches and had a head transplant. But Phillips was correct in his performance, which goes down as one of the better impersonations of a rock star in spirit.
If not appearance. The music of the star is included at regular intervals as Ritchie starts out with an amateur band who we can tell will only hold him back if he sticks with them, then gets his own solo gigs where he is much appreciated, to the point where a manager and record producer in Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano, also looking nothing like the man he played) assists in the teenager's rise to stardom. It's this meteoric success, which took place over an incredible eight months, which means as a drama this doesn't hang about, and gives over some room to Ritchie's problems with his brother, some invented for the film, but otherwise staying fairly close to the facts.
Bob here is depicted as the opposite of Ritchie as far as careers went, a wastrel who had his own potential artistically but unlike his half-brother was unable to get his big break thanks to a battle with the bottle. There's a danger of this all getting close to soap opera rather than electrifying drama, and Ritchie's romance with Donna (Danielle von Zerneck), whom his hit song was based around, could have been taken from any "relationship across the tracks" plot, something found in teen movies from the time they were invented. But the cast, and Valdez's script, sell this due to the endless fascination the public have with those stars who died too young, and you can feel a lump in your throat as this draws to its sad end, thinking of all that potential that was only partly realised in the life of Valens. If La Bamba does anything right, it's in portraying him as a genuinely decent and talented kid, cut down too soon.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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