After this magical prelude, the story cuts to J. Lo on the back of a motorcycle, her face pure bliss as she holds tightly to the driver while the two careen down a picturesque mountainous beachscape. That is until the motorcycle crashes, the two separate, and the picture crumbles, leaving Lopez stranded in an apocalyptic steampunk heart factory. Here we get the film’s first musical interlude “Hearts and Flowers,” its lyrics as cheesy and earnest as Lopez’s narration. “I made it through the rain, the trauma and the pain,” she sings as she and the factory workers — styled a la Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” — frenetically work to refill the breaking metal heart with the petals of red flowers, all which seem to have wilted away.
Although Lopez’s vocals have a little too much autotune for my taste, her dance moves are as energetic and crisp as ever. In the sequence set to the song “Rebound,” couples residing in a glass house are bound to each other with pieces of long, colored cloth. When they pull away, the cloth yanks them back together like yo-yos, in choreography in the Tanztheater style pioneered by the late German modern dancer Pina Bausch. Another sequence set in a group therapy session draws inspiration from “Mein Herr” from “Cabaret,” with Lopez bringing a stripped-down emotional rawness to the choreography.
The film weaves back and forth between these dreamlike sequences set to tracks from her new album, therapy sessions Lopez has with her good friend Fat Joe, and some truly unhinged moments with a group of astrological stars (played by literal stars Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Keke Palmer, Jennifer Lewis, Kim Petras, Jay Shetty, Sofia Vergara, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Trevor Noah, and Sadhguru) known as the Zodiacal Council. Although each star plays one of the corresponding Zodiac signs, hilariously there is no representation for Aquarius or Capricorn. I’ll let the astrology girlies figure that one out. Of these vignettes the ones with Fat Joe work the best due to his calming energy and the strong rapport after decades of professional collaborations and friendship. Oscar-nominee Paul Raci also brings his steadfast presence to one of the more successful vignettes as the leader of a Romantics Anonymous group therapy session.