D

Hector Lavoe, the salsa singer at the center of “El Cantante,” might have been an interesting fellow, but one would never know it from the musical biopic, a labor of love for Jennifer Lopez, who’s one of the producers (as well as starring along with her husband Marc Anthony) but a complete mess of a movie that mingles every cliché of the genre with a hyperkinetic style more likely to induce vertigo than sympathy or understanding.

Basically the story is just the standard tale of a talented fellow from an impoverished background whose innate talent brings him sudden, unexpected success, which in turn leads to self-destructive behavior. In this case he’s a callow immigrant from Puerto Rico named Hector Perez (Anthony) who finds almost immediate recognition after blundering into a New York nightclub, where he also meets his future wife Puchi (Lopez). Paired with trumpeter Willie Colon (John Ortiz) by record mogul Jerry Masucci (Federico Castelluccio), who also changes his name to Lavoe, Hector quickly becomes a star by mixing various styles, including merenge and jazz, into what comes to be called salsa.

Unfortunately, Hector gets addicted to drugs, and the effect on his career is predictably dire, particularly when illness—AIDS, in particular—is added to the mix. His marriage, meanwhile, turns sour, and the couple’s rows ultimately have a tragic effect on their son. Things don’t turn out well for either Hector or Puchi.

Nor for the actors. Anthony makes a bland hero, reactive rather than energetic except when he’s onstage; the musical sequences are easily the best thing in the picture, but they’re too infrequent and too brief. And though Lopez puts a lot of generalized rage into her turn, it all seems showy and vacuous. (It was a particularly bad idea to have her narrate the story through periodic inserts in which she recreates bits and pieces of an interview the real Puchi gave near the end of her life. Not only are the snippets as full of cliches as the story itself, but Lopez plays them so brusquely that they make her character even more unpleasant. The poor “aging” makeup is no help.) The supporting cast is actually better, though they’re given very little to do.

Even the finest acting, however, couldn’t survive the misguided direction by Leon Ichaso, who exacerbates the already jumpy, ill-constructed character of the script he co-wrote with David Darmstaedter and Todd Anthony Bello with a hectic, overwrought visual style (complete with whiz-bang transitional montages courtesy of editor David Tedeschi) that may be intended to mimic the zest of salsa music but succeeds only in being overly busy and ultimately exhausting. (Imagine Joe Carnahan directing a musical.) The rest of the technical contributions look a bit on the low-rent side, but given the mostly murky cinematography of Claudio Chea, it’s somewhat hard to judge them fairly.

It’s especially unfortunate that “El Cantante” follows close on the heels on one of the best example of the musical biography to appear in recent years—the Edith Piaf-inspired “La Vie en Rose.” This would be a bad movie under any circumstances, but by comparison to that film it’s pretty much a disaster.