143 min | PG-13 | June 10, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Usnavi runs a corner bodega in Washington Heights and saves every dollar to reopen his late father’s beach bar in the Dominican Republic. Jon M. Chu turns Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical into a sun-baked block party about home and the people who build one. The dancing is better than the plot.
In the Heights follows Usnavi, who runs a corner bodega in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. He squirrels away his cash and plans to return to the Dominican Republic and revive his late father’s seaside bar. The film tracks a handful of residents across a few summer days as a heat wave and a citywide blackout press down on the block. Each character carries a “sueñito,” a little dream that the neighborhood both feeds and frustrates. The story is really about home and whether the place that raised you can hold you. It asks whether dignity comes from where you go or where you stay.
Anthony Ramos plays Usnavi with warmth and a restless energy that anchors the whole ensemble. He narrates the story and carries its melancholy underneath the showmanship. Leslie Grace plays Nina Rosario, the block’s college success story who comes back from Stanford hauling a shame she will not name. Grace finds the gap between what Nina owes the neighborhood and what it cost her to leave it. Olga Merediz reprises her stage role as Abuela Claudia and grounds the film in her number “Paciencia y Fe.” Corey Hawkins gives Benny a steady decency, and Gregory Díaz IV makes Sonny the sharpest voice in the movie as an undocumented teenager with no legal path to the dreams everyone else sings about.
Jon M. Chu stages the musical numbers as full street takeovers rather than contained set pieces. “96,000” floods a public pool with dozens of synchronized swimmers and turns a lottery fantasy into Busby Berkeley spectacle. The standout is “When the Sun Goes Down,” where Chu sends Benny and Nina dancing up the vertical face of an apartment building in open defiance of gravity. Quiara Alegría Hudes adapts her own stage book and shifts the center toward Nina and the immigration anxieties of the present. Chu favors the wide shot and lets you watch the entire choreographed block move at once. Sonny’s storyline carries the political weight that the songs keep at the edges.
The film overflows. Chu packs so much into every frame that the quiet character beats get crowded out by the next number. The thinner romances run on charm rather than written stakes, and the plot machinery creaks whenever the dancing stops. What survives all of it is the warmth. In the Heights believes that a neighborhood is worth singing about and commits to that belief without a trace of irony. It is a generous film about staying and leaving, and it earns its joy even when the story strains to keep pace.