‘In the Heights’ Review: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical comes to the screen as an exuberant and heartfelt party, directed by Jon M. Chu and starring Anthony Ramos.

“In the Heights” begins with a man — Usnavi, played by Anthony Ramos — telling a story to a group of children. They are gathered on the patio of a bar on a palm-fringed, sun-kissed beach in the Dominican Republic. The bar is called El Sueñito, or the Little Dream, and the name is at once a clue, a spoiler and the key to the themes of this exuberant and heartfelt musical. A dream can be a fantasy or a goal, an escape or an aspiration, a rejection of the way things are or an affirmation of what could be. “In the Heights,” adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Tony-winning Broadway show, embraces all of these meanings. After more than a year of desultory streaming, anemic entertainment and panicky doomscrolling, it’s a dream come true. The director, Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) draws on the anti-realist traditions of Hollywood song-and-dance spectacle to vault the characters (and the audience) into exalted realms of feeling and magic. Two lovers step off a tenement fire escape and pirouette up and down the walls of the building in a sweet and thrilling defiance of gravity. A public swimming pool turns into a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of kineticism and color. The wigs on a beauty salon shelf bounce along to the beat of a big production number.