In the Heights (2021)

In the Heights arrives as a $55 million song-and-dance picture about a Dominican bodega owner who cannot decide whether to stay in Upper Manhattan or return to the island, and it spends its runtime making certain we understand that the decision is not really about him. The ensemble is almost entirely Latino and Afro-Latino, the camera lingers on the murals and the fire escapes with genuine affection, and the casting alone registers as a statement in a studio system that spent decades hiring around the neighborhood instead of inside it. Jon M. Chu keeps the numbers buoyant. The film is pleasant, which is not the same as harmless.

The screenplay, adapted by Quiara Alegria Hudes from her own book with Lin-Manuel Miranda, has been updated for the 2020s in ways visible from the first act. Nina's reasons for leaving Stanford now include the racism she met there. Sonny is undocumented, a change from the stage version, and the film stages a DACA rally complete with a protest leader played by an actual NPR journalist. Gentrification is named, rents are named, microaggressions are named. Daniela and Carla are now a couple, a quiet revision the film treats as unremarkable, which is the correct instinct. The result is a musical that occasionally stops singing in order to explain itself.

Where the film declines to go is instructive. The blackout is weather and wiring, not a climate parable. Nobody discusses body image. Nobody is neurodivergent. History is left where it was found. The economic critique stops at the landlord's doorstep and never reaches the system behind him, and the sermonizing, sincere as it is, lasts only until the next dance break. It grossed $45 million against a $200 million break-even and was promptly forgotten by an industry already looking elsewhere. A warm, overstuffed, well-meaning picture. Good intentions and a hit remain different currencies.