"Pinero," the slight if stirring film biography of the Puerto Rican poet-playwright-actor, functions as both requiem and celebration.
At times, you may wish for a fuller scope and richer canvas than writer-director Leon Ichaso provides, but Benjamin Bratt does his finest screen work to date playing a man at once teasing and tormented.
Given the right Oscar campaign, the man formerly best known as Julia Roberts' boyfriend and Detective Rey Curtis on "Law & Order," could be this year's Javier Bardem, the Spanish actor nominated last year for "Before Night Falls."
Miguel Pinero, who died at age 41 in 1988, achieved success principally as a playwright, writing one of the most incendiary plays of the 1970s the prison-themed "Short Eyes."
"Pinero" jumps from black and white to color and from film to video for no apparent reason, and it skips around in time. It weaves a scenario of the young Pinero's modest origins as one of five children in Puerto Rico Rita Moreno appears intermittently as his impassioned mother through his emergence as a major figure amid the Nuyorican poets' movement.
In Manhattan, Pinero found an important champion in Joseph Papp, the late theater impresario played by Mandy Patinkin.
That cavil aside, there's considerable interest in watching Pinero juggle his own seductions into the worlds of crime and drugs with a singular talent that bore real fruit with "Short Eyes."
Hatched from his own prison experiences, "Short Eyes" began life as a workshop at Sing Sing before being picked up as a Tony-nominated Broadway play.
If the play seemed angry and rough, so, too, was Pinero's slide into despair that caused him to die of cirrhosis; while "Short Eyes" was shaking up New York audiences at its 1974 opening, Pinero was mugging people to support his other life as a junkie.
The movie thankfully doesn't indulge in too much psychoanalysis, preferring to capture the rhythms of a writer who served as an antecedent of the hip-hop and rap movements.
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