Hero and Villain

Miguel Piñero was poet, playwright and actor–and thief, liar and junkie. He was in Sing Sing by his early 20s, the iconic leader of New York’s Puerto Rican artistic movement by 30, a dead junkie by 40; yet the causes for Piñero’s life trajectory remain largely unanswerable. Leon Ichaso’s new biopic of Piñero (with Benjamin Bratt in the lead) gives us a lot of data and background but doesn’t really try to explain, as much as it merely presents. Ichaso–director of such less-inspired works as Crossover Dreams and Bitter Sugar–uses a mix-and-match patchwork of black-and-white and color shots, with lots of deliberately grainy 16mm footage and digital video tossed into the mix, all to simulate a sense of raw documentary reality to bring us closer to New York’s grit and energy. The big surprise here is that Bratt–best known from TV’s Law and Order and from mediocre performances in such less-than-mediocre films as The Next Best Thing and Miss Congeniality–totally redeems himself here and then some. His transformation into a stoned-out, wasted mess is completely convincing; it’s the kind of flashy change-of-pace performance that has Oscar nomination written all over it, and deservedly so.