Blissfully colourful, fun and basic: In The Heights reviewed

In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton — and it is all-singing, all-dancing, and a ‘feelgood summer movie’, as they say. True, the storytelling is quite basic — anyone frowning over a calculator is sure to have money worries — and by the end of two and a half hours you may well be praying for less singing, and less dancing, I beg you. But what the hell. It’s colourful, it’s fun. It has an unstoppable energy. It has some tremendous set-pieces. And it’s blissfully straightforward. It’s not one of those films that comes at you like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and neither will it send you running to the internet to search for ‘insert-name-of-film explainer’, which is just such a relief, as I seem to have seen so many of those lately. This is, in fact, the first big blockbuster release since Tenet, and I’m still googling explainers for that.

Directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians), the film is entirely set in Washington Heights, a Latino neighbourhood in Upper Manhattan, New York, and stars Anthony Ramos as our main character, Usnavi. He was named after one of the first sights his parents saw on arrival in America from the Dominican Republic, a ship with ‘US Navy’ written along the side. Usnavi runs a small grocery store and the first tune introduces us to many of the other characters as they visit his shop and as he frets over his bust refrigerator. ‘The milk has gone bad, hold up just a second/ Why is everything in this fridge warm and tepid?/ I better step it up and fight the heat/ ’Cause I’m not makin’ any profit if the coffee isn’t light and sweet!’ The style of music is hip-hop, like Hamilton, plus salsa, merengue and rap, and while I can now see that the lyrics look rubbish on paper, it’s sung with such oomph and verve it all makes perfect sense on screen.