“The streets were made of music,” Washington Heights bodega owner Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) muses in the opening moments of Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights, the big-screen adaptation of the 2008 Tony-winning musical. As captured by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who broke onto the scene as the show’s composer and lyricist (he also played Usnavi on Broadway), the neighborhood seems to demand storytelling through song: Music is everywhere in In the Heights because music is everywhere in the lives of its characters, from blasting radios to street musicians’ salsa concerts to corner rap battles. The opening number’s clave rhythms magnify into the sounds of the community, each jangle of keys and spray of a hose falling into musical pattern. Even a loose manhole underfoot becomes a DJ’s turntable.
In the film’s most stunning shot, Usnavi stares out from his shop window as the camera observes him from outside. In the window’s reflection, the passersby suddenly transform into a dance ensemble as Usnavi watches them. Up until that moment, perhaps 10 minutes into the film, Chu has shown us the physical life of Washington Heights as it really exists—people working, walking, sitting on stoops, standing on terraces. When the community springs into dance, it’s reflected through Usnavi’s imaginative gaze. Musical theater and its central conceits—people breaking into song and dance—have seldom made more sense on film than they do here. In the Heights surges with cinematographic empathy that matches its protagonist’s desire to recognize the dignity and humanity in everyone he meets: Usnavi, like Miranda, sees the artistry and grace in his neighbors and insists that we see them that way too.
Everyone here has “sueñitos,” or little dreams. Usnavi longs to return to the Dominican Republic to reopen the beachside bar that his late parents ran. Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace), back home after freshman year of college, strives to reconcile the dehumanizing reality of being a Latina at Stanford with the high-flying hopes that her father, Kevin (Jimmy Smits), has for her. Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), Usnavi’s crush, yearns to quit her job at the beauty salon run by Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega), move downtown, and become a fashion designer. And Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), Usnavi’s cousin, who helps him run the shop, isn’t just a dreamer but a Dreamer, organizing protests to protect his future in the face of threats to DACA.
Quiara Alegría Hudes’s screenplay (adapted from her original book for the musical) integrates that political aspect shrewdly, melding identity to history more urgently than the stage version did. Hudes elevates Sonny’s adolescent activism from a punchline on stage to a plotline in the film. (In a cast with extraordinary vocal talent and no weak links, it’s 16-year-old Diaz’s quirky, stubborn warmth that stands out most.) That shift, plus a swift PSA-like tribute to Latina heroes including Sonia Sotomayor inserted mid-film, bring In the Heights into a purposeful near-present. (The 45th president, name-checked innocently back in the aughts in the song “96,000,” has been gracefully replaced in that lyric by Tiger Woods.)
And things have also changed over the past 13 years for Miranda and for the place of musical theater itself in the cultural landscape, thanks to Hamilton. There’s no shortage of Easter eggs here for the Hamilfans: Miranda and his In the Heights and Hamilton co-star Christopher Jackson feature as rival street salesmen dueling from their piragua cart and Mister Softee truck, respectively. When Kevin is put on hold, the wait music that plays is an instrumental cover of Hamilton’s “You’ll Be Back.” There’s even a cameo appearance from Miranda’s father.
In the Heights, though, is far from the snapshot artifact of Miranda’s pre-Hamilton career that it could have been. For one, the filmmakers execute what couldn’t be done on stage by centering geography throughout. Scenes dig into Washington Heights locations—the park, the pool, the salon—and linger long enough in each place to articulate their beauty. These spaces are densely detailed, sometimes even overwhelming in their exuberant specificity. And because this is a film that insists on expansiveness, on the belief in its characters’ boundlessness, Chu tosses out the rulebook altogether, tilting toward the fantastical in sequences that briefly mix life-action and animation or turn those richly rendered spaces into something otherworldly. “When the Sun Goes Down,” for example, a sweet duet between Nina and Benny (Corey Hawkins), swivels from static to ecstatic in the film version, as the pair magically lifts off a fire escape, dancing sideways up the façade of a building.
In the film’s most innovative visual sequence, “Paciencia y Fe,” Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz, the only principal cast member from the original stage production who reprises her role here) retells her childhood journey from Havana, “a crowded city of faces the same as mine,” to New York, where she trades the stars for the slow climb to stability: “Ain’t no Cassiopeia in Washington Heights/But ain’t no food in La Vibora,” she sings. The filmmakers stage the song in and out of dreamlike subway cars and platforms, with Claudia’s fellow passengers morphing into her Cuban neighbors and then her hostile, racist employers as she recalls her life working as a maid. Each car that Claudia steps into becomes a new immersive set for the next stage of her story. It’s a rendering that collaboratively travels between two worlds—theater and film—in conjuring something that seems to stretch both media.
Consistently surprising and creatively fearless, Chu’s film brings monumentality to a work of infinite heart. In the Heights tells a sweeping story about how people find their way home when torn between the streets where they’ve grown up and the land whose flag, as Usnavi sings, “contiene mi alma entera,” his entire soul. And this story itself has come home, too, to a filmic nest that honors theatrical roots while offering a brighter, wider, more permanent illumination of the lives and legacies contained inside.
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