‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ review: J.Lo seizes her spotlight

“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a sexual and scatological dazzler about an inmate‘s obsession with a favorite musical, sounds like the kind of thing some folks won’t watch even if they, too, were locked in a prison for years. Their loss. In the spirit of the film, I’ll try to change their mind.

It’s 1983 Argentina, the last days of a militarized dictatorship under which 30,000 people have been disappeared. Scraggly, severe Valentin (Diego Luna) is a political prisoner with ties to the revolutionary underground. His new cellmate is a brazen chatterbox named Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay window dresser serving an eight-year sentence for indecency in a public bathroom. They have zero shared interests. But to pass the time — and, more importantly, to get Valentin to put down his biography of Lenin and talk a little — Molina recounts the plot of a Golden Age spectacular starring the fictional movie star Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a red-lipped, pineapple-blond beauty whose vintage posters brighten their wretched gray walls.

“I hate musicals,” Valentin complains.

“Then I pity you,” Molina says breezily, charging into the first scene.

Through beatings and starvation, poisonings and betrayals, all under the gaze of the oppressive warden (Bruno Bichir), Valentin and Molina escape into Technicolor in a desperate need for distraction. The writer-director Bill Condon (“Chicago,” “Dreamgirls”) has savvily, unabashedly reworked the 1993 Broadway extravaganza (already a bold adaptation of the 1976 experimental novel and 1985 Academy Award-winning drama). He’s double-cast Luna and Tonatiuh as the film-within-a-film’s leads and changed the imaginary tale from a Nazi propaganda flick to a melodramatic but moving South American romance between a glamour queen and a noble photographer. Its themes of love and sacrifice come to mirror Valentin and Molina’s own relationship.

The songs themselves are the same rather-forgettable numbers by John Kander and Fred Ebb who did a zingier job mixing fascism with feathers in “Cabaret.” “Live inside me on a movie screen,” Lopez’s Ingrid sings, luring Molina to get lost in daydreams. Behind her, dancers gyrate like victims being electrocuted. (I wouldn’t have minded more jolts of morbid humor.) Unhummable as the music is, its message has a spark: In the war for liberation, it’s OK to take mental breaks.

In fact, pleasure is necessary, especially for the regularly tortured Valentin who seems to have been numb for a long time. (Communist memoirs don’t stir the soul.) A hardline ascetic, Valentin won’t even alert the medics when he’s sick, in case they give him morphine.

The two roommates comically bicker about what scant pop culture Valentin knows, taking shots at “Raging Bull,” Meryl Streep and his own crass insistence that Ingrid’s character, Aurora, is frigid due to some kind of childhood trauma. (“Oh, God, let her be,” Molina sighs.) Yet, their conversation always pirouettes back to the gap between the real world and the movies.

“I hate to break it to you,” Valentine says, “but nobody sings in real life.”

“Well, maybe they should,” Molina huffs.

Maybe in confinement they can’t.

Condon smartly limits who sings and why and when. In the 1985 drama, which starred Raul Julia and William Hurt (who won the Oscar for Molina), both men remained trapped in this horrible dungeon and never sang a song. On Broadway, all of the characters — even cranky Valentin — crooned numbers the whole way through. But Condon draws a thick line between reality and fiction to highlight how much his leads need the freedom for radical self-expression.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is about a lot of things: Valentin reconnecting with his emotions, Luis discovering that he’s more than a self-described trivial sissy. (“I cringe every time you make fun of yourself,” Valentin growls.) But it’s fundamentally about those scenes in which the palette and polish of the film shifts and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler switches from handheld to Steadicam. The putrid chamber drama becomes a fantasia, befouled rags turn into tuxedo pants and it’s finally safe to belt how they feel.

Earlier incarnations of this story had activism as the end goal, Valentin for his principles and Molina for his new friend. Condon is more focused on their humanity. Caring for each other makes this bleak world worth fighting for. Without joy, we’re already in chains.

People will come out of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” gushing about Tonatiuh and with good reason. Striding confidently into his first starring role, the L.A.-born breakout talent is a bright new discovery with shining eyes and brash exuberance. He needs to be excellent for the movie to succeed and he’s pretty darned close, even pulling off a glib beat where Molina recoils from a battered man and quips, “If I looked like that, I’d want a bag over my head too.” There are scenes where he comes off arch and a little telegraphed, although in fairness, that’s also just who Molina is — performance is protection. And when Tonatiuh cowers from the guards, we get a hint of what Molina has suffered without Condon ever having to show the abuse.

To keep things faithful to 1983, Tonatiuh’s Molina doesn’t identify as transgender — the character sticks to the limited vocabulary of the time. But you see Molina’s subtle disappointment when Valentin, trying to be supportive, insists, “You’re not a monster, you’re a man.” And Condon has tweaked a climactic refrain, changing the pronoun to “Her name was Molina.”

Playing Ingrid-as-Aurora — the heroine of a film that, even its biggest fan admits, is “no ‘Citizen Kane’” — Lopez is shellacked under two layers of diva artifice. But at this point in her career, she’s suited to being an icon. She’s long since given up pretending she’s still Jenny from the Block, and Condon has shaped the role of Ingrid to her like a corset. You hear it in the line, “No matter how hard Hollywood tried to make her all-American, she never stopped being Latin” and more than that, you see it in Lopez’s delight as she flashes her legs and tosses her hair. She knows she can nail this role and she really hoofs it. There’s a wide-angle shot of a nightclub where Condon gives her and a dozen background performers a full, uncut minute to twirl. Most impressively, Lopez grabs a martini, slowly does a one-legged spin to the ground and then uncoils herself to stand back up and cheer.

She has a harder time commanding the screen in a third role, when Ingrid also acts the part of the sinister Spider Woman, a spiky-haired, taloned jungle goddess who smooches her prey to death. The movie’s stiff Spider Woman set pieces are a relic of the ’90s musical that put Chita Rivera in a massive web. Trapped in them, Lopez can’t do much more than a predatory grin. But it’s still better than how Condon’s “Chicago” chopped up its choreography into close-ups (and here, there’s still a few gratingly askew camera angles). The new film is the director’s penance: an apologia to musical lovers who want to see the star do every inch of the dancing.

Still, my favorite performance has to be Luna’s, whose Valentin is at once strong and vulnerable, like a mutt attempting to fend off a bear. He’s the only one who doesn’t need to prove he’s a great actor, yet he feels like a revelation. Watching him gradually turn tender sends tingles through your heartstrings. For his second role as Ingrid’s onscreen boyfriend, Condon resurrects a discarded number from the original musical where Luna croons about being “An Everyday Man,” his warm voice perfectly imperfect. Even when he’s grouchy and filthy, you get why Molina would imagine Valentin as the ideal romantic lead.

I don’t want to spoil the ending other than to say that Condon adds an exclamation point to his insistence on music as emancipation with a new scene set after the fall of the junta and its right-wing abduction squads. The camera looks down at the jail as the inmates spill into the courtyard. Then it pulls up for an aerial shot of the entire block. We see citizens flood the streets. We hear honking horns and spontaneous street music. The whole country is free to sing.