This is Me ... Now: Jennifer Lopez’s cinematic odyssey is an entirely insane CG-drenched R&B cheese dream

In the bonkers and unpredictable film-cum-music video, the impossibly glamorous star reflects on her life as a serial monogamist. Photo / Prime Video

“You may think you know my story,” Jennifer Lopez intones in the prologue to her new film, “but you’ve never heard it from me before.”

This Is Me … Now, a “narrative-driven cinematic odyssey” released in conjunction with the singer’s ninth studio album, is presumably her attempt to set the record straight. A little over an hour after this introduction – having watched Lopez survive a high-speed motorcycle crash, single-handedly prevent a futuristic factory from exploding, get chased through the Bronx by ghosts and stalk around a luxurious Los Angeles mansion the size of a B&Q – I can’t say I felt any more clued up on her love-life than I had been beforehand. But I was vibrating to the tips of my fingers regardless, because whatever this is – movie, music video, open-door therapy session, entirely insane CG-drenched R&B cheese dream – it is a modern-day pop-art tour de force.

Part of the joy of watching This Is Me … Now is seeing an artist with nothing left to prove blow what must have been an obscene amount of money on a project that is both 100 per cent personal and at least 1000 per cent bonkers. Though the film is being released by Amazon, Lopez apparently had to fund its production herself: having seen it, this is easy to believe.

It is a loosely connected series of dramatic scenes and musical numbers in which Lopez reflects on her life as a serial monogamist. Some are highly allegorical – in the factory scene mentioned above, she has to repair an enormous malfunctioning metal contraption in the shape of a heart; one shot finds her sprinting past a leaking pipe marked “tear ducts”. Others, such as a wedding sequence in which she appears to be marrying three grooms at once, are staged and acted like rom-coms.

There are also regular counselling scenes, in which Lopez pours out her heart to a psychiatrist played by the What’s Luv? And We Thuggin’ rapper Fat Joe. And sporadically chiming in from on high is the Zodiacal Council: a coterie of celestial beings played by, among others, Jane Fonda, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Kim Petras. Ben Affleck – now Lopez’s husband, and her romantic partner during her first flush of global fame – makes a cameo too, as a ranting Right-wing news host. If Lopez’s screen career has often tended towards the unsurprising, well, here is the antidote: perhaps the least predictable film ever made.

What’s most exciting about it, though, is that behind the lunacy, so much of it works. The editing, music-video frantic, really should have been calmer to allow the choreography more space to breathe. But the songs themselves are superb, with an extraordinary vivid Dolby Atmos mix: during the title number, I could feel the bass guitar strings thrumming on my forehead. And Lopez is endlessly watchable – warm, funny and impossibly glamorous, even (perhaps especially) on the therapist’s couch.

It ends with – why not? – a homage to the greatest film Hollywood ever made, as Lopez jigs down an LA street in a midnight downpour, laughing at clouds so dark up above. One imagines Gene Kelly would be flattered, if also confused as to what on Earth he’d just watched.

This Is Me … Now: A Love Story will stream globally on Prime Video on February 16, 2024