“Life is a snake. A snake crawling out of its own dead skin. Like a dream.”
Like the classic 1950s rock ‘n’ roll songs that fill out its soundtrack, Luis Valdez’s La Bamba is concise and congenial—a good time with no strings attached.
Starring Lou Diamond Phillips as poor migrant farmhand turned teenage pop sensation Ritchie Valens, the film runs through the standard rags-to-riches storyline you know by heart even if you don’t know this one specifically: scrappy youngster whose dreams are “pure rock ‘n’ roll,” garage band, bar gigs, talent scout (Joe Pantoliano), taste of fame and fortune, a hard-pressed mother (Rosanna DeSoto), a regional tour, girlfriend drama (Danielle von Zerneck). The rock ‘n’ roll era is vibrantly recreated, with numerous cover versions of Valens’ songs provided for Phillips to mime by Chicano rock band Los Lobos, and a score from Carlos Santana (who I will incidentally be seeing play guitar live in the flesh in a few days).
It would feel too lightweight and feel-good were it not given a sense of heaviness by the Cain-Abel dynamic between Ritchie and his hair-trigger bad boy half-brother (Esai Morales), with the older brother constantly wavering between support and ridicule, sometimes inspired to clean his act up and settle down with his baby’s mama (Elizabeth Peña), other times compelled toward resentment and self destruction. In his worst moods, he tries to drag Ritchie down with him, but even these experiences, such as a motorcycle trip to Tijuana, prove formative for Ritchie. (Their relationship brings to mind the central conflict of Sean Penn’s great film The Indian Runner.)
The film begins with, and is laced with, dream visions of a plane exploding and crashing onto a schoolyard basketball court. At one point, Ritchie mentions that his childhood best friend died in the freak accident while he was at his own grandfather’s funeral—he’s developed a sort of secondhand memory of the event and his phobia gives the entire film a haunted aspect. Of course these inclusions have a more sinister purpose, which turns La Bamba, and indeed Valens’ life, from an incandescent burst of spirited showmanship, into a tragedy: on February 3, 1959, a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly (Marshall Howard Crenshaw) and The Big Bopper (Stephen Lee).
In his classic song ‘American Pie,’ Don MacLean dubbed it “The Day the Music Died.” Such an end precludes the standard fall from grace that usually characterizes the second half of these biopics, however, the focus on Valens’ family dynamics and the Latino-white romance, provides sufficient drama to carry the film’s narrative, allowing Valdez to memorialize his subject with the same spirited energy that infused Valens’ music, without striking notes of aggrandizement or outright hagiography.