“It takes a while to warm up to me,” says Jennifer Lopez in a pep talk to the troupe of admirably stoic dancers she’s been putting through the wringer for several months. The same is true of Amanda…
, opens at such a pace it causes narrative whiplash, starting the countdown to the Super Bowl show in July 2019 and simultaneously tracking Lopez’s bumpy ride through awards season after the Toronto Film Festival premiere of Lorene Scafaria’sin September the same year. An early attempt to weave in Lopez’s deprived but happy childhood seems perfunctory—a clip of thesong “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” and she’s out of the family home in the grey boredom of the Bronx, aged just 18.
There are several Jennifer Lopezes in the film, which is fitting since its subject enthusiastically embraces her own multiplicity, often referring to her musical persona in the third person. Music and dancing seem to be her focus and her passion, and one gets the impression that she had rather forgotten about her acting career untilbrought with it a deserved awards buzz that, as we see here, crushingly fizzled out before the Oscars .
All this information tends to crowd out what Lopez is building towards—a stage show that will rebut the Trump administration’s dehumanizing attitude to Latinx people, with hordes of little girls bursting out of symbolic cages singing her 1999 hit “Let’s Get Loud.