“This Is Me ... Now: A Love Story ”Review: Jennifer Lopez Rediscovers Romance — and Herself

Her autobiographical Amazon musical ends happily ever after with a prince named Ben Affleck

This Is Me . . . Now: A Love Story, the conceptual musical that accompanies Jennifer Lopez’s new album of the same name, is the superstar’s valentine to romance, to husband Ben Affleck and — why not? — to herself.

Me, now streaming on Amazon, is essentially a fairy tale or fable reconfigured in terms of the modern myth of self-validation.

Lopez plays a woman, named the Artist, who keeps tripping up in her relationships. Why? Because she’s forgotten to love herself! Once that lesson is unlocked, she’s liberated from her past and ready to find her forever-after soulmate: Although he’s glimpsed only elliptically at the end, Prince Charming has Affleck’s lightly stubbled cleft chin.

It’s a gauzy, dreamy moment of union, unlike the couple’s recent Super Bowl ad for Dunkin' Donuts. That falls more into the tradition of domestic marital comedy, post-union, with its hints of amiable friction and give-and-take after years together. Although, compared to what most people experience in long-term relationships, that ad is gauzy and dreamy, as well.

The 65 minutes leading to Me’s Affleck apotheosis add up to a pull-out-all-the-stops musical — wildly, deliriously ornate — that sweeps us through a string of extravagant fantasy numbers, all of them showcasing the album’s infectious songs. We see:

Lopez sorting rose petals on a conveyor belt in a factory driven by a giant steampunk heart (she said recently that this is a metaphor for her breakup with Affleck 20 years ago); Lopez desperately hurtling herself from one end of a see-through plexiglass apartment to the other while trying to escape an abusive lover; Lopez whirling through a chiffon-light sequence imagining her repeated trips to the altar for three ultimately unsuccessful marriages; and, finally, Lopez dancing happily through a downpour — it’s an homage to Gene Kelly’s immortal number in Singin’ in the Rain, but with much heavier precipitation. Lopez apparently isn't worry about how long it will take to dry out, which is perhaps a sign of fulfillment and completion.

Meanwhile, somewhere up in the stratosphere, a wisecracking council of zodiac figures — presided over by none other than Jane Fonda as Sagittarius, who's backed up by A-listers like Post Malone and Sofia Vergara — looks down in concern and bemusement. It’s Clash of the Titans meets “Jenny From the Block” — not a sentence anyone probably ever expected to read.

Lopez is also given advice by a group of friends, ordinary, run-of-the-mill mortals who show up from time to time. They even steer her to a support group. This results in the film’s weakest scene — it’s something like A Chorus Line’s “At the Ballet” performed with limbs wrenched in agony.

But who are these friends, anyway? Why would Lopez aka the Artist ever bother with them? When she’s away from them and alone in her immense house, she mopes about in an enviable state of supreme, languorous glamour — a diva unencumbered.

Lopez is as entitled to this gorgeous pose of solitude as she is to love.

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