La Bamba (1987)

(In French, On TV, April 2019) It happened more than a decade and a half before I was born, but I’m still surprisingly mournful about The Day the Music Died — The February 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson. Much of the story has been told in another film (1978’s The Buddy Holly Story), but La Bamba focuses on the life of Richie Valens, who died just as he was gathering attention as a rocker. The film is thin but satisfying, spending a lot of time on the rags-to-fame aspect of Valens’s life, occasionally delivering a musical number along the way. From a story perspective, it’s not much and not particularly uplifting (the film, knowing that many viewers already know the end of the story, heavily prefigures its ending by focusing on Valens’s fear of dying in a plane crash even from the first scene), so much of the appeal depends on the film’s musical numbers. Fortunately, there are a few high-powered numbers along the way, not only from Valens (“Donna” but especially his rock-and-roll take on the until-then folk song “La Bamba”) but also other musicians from the early rock-and-roll era in its fun and carefree atmosphere. The centrepiece of La Bamba, of course, is Lou Diamond Phillips’s first on-screen role, a tough part that requires good acting and performing skills. Fortunately, Phillips nails it—his stage performances are very enjoyable once he hits the big time in the film’s second half, with some underrated support from Esai Morales as his brother and Elizabeth Peña as his sister-in-law. While La Bamba isn’t perfect (I would have liked to see more time spent with the musicians) and seems cut short just as dramatically as Valens’s own career, it does have a few strong moments and its credit sequence, after a sombre ending, ends by highlighting its biggest strength once more—an uncut shot of Phillips performing “La Bamba” one more time.