Rapper Meets Reggaetón (and Girl)

Cast : Rosa Arredondo,Luis Cruz,Melonie Diaz,Charles DuckworthShowing at: BIG Cinemas: Chinchwad,BIG Cinemas: Gold,E-Square,INOX,City Pride Multiplex

There’s a lot going on under the surface of Feel the Noise,far more than its indefensibly generic title suggests. Its milieu is fascinating; its melodrama-about a rising performer’s tribulations-less so.

Rob (the R&B semistar Omarion,billed as Omarion Grandberry) is a struggling Harlem rapper in trouble with the police and a thug whose hubcaps he tried to steal. When the heat proves too strong,he is sent to live with his long-estranged father,Roberto (a fine Giancarlo Esposito),and his stepmother in Puerto Rico. There,thanks to his stepbrother,Javi (Victor Rasuk),a turn-tablist who shares his ambitions,he discovers reggaetón,the genre that melds hip-hop,reggae and Latin rhythms. He also meets the bewitching dancer CC (Zulay Henao,looking like a younger version of Jennifer Lopez,who is one of the film’s producers). When she sets him up with a music industry operator (James McCaffrey,as a middle-aged predator),Rob,CC and Javi head to New York,where Rob must face his past and his future.

The movie’s surface has charms: the director,Alejandro Chomski,skillfully contrasts Manhattan neutrals with San Juan pastels; a Puerto Rican DayParade sequence (spotlighting,in a fleeting,self-serving shot,Lopez) has texture; and there’s no resisting reggaetón’s seductive throb. But Grandberry has only two guns in his emotional holster: sullen and boyish,inadequate for anchoring the movie.

It’s the subtexts – about minority kinship and Hispanic self-actualisation – that resound. If only its fable (and leading man) didn’t keep getting in the way.