La Bamba (1987): Can a Rock God be Sweet?

Can a rock god be a sweet angelic boy — someone wants nothing more than to buy his mother a house and do right by his high school sweetheart and extended family?

My experience with rock and roll biopics (Ray, Walk the Line, Dreamgirls, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Doors, Almost Famous) has taught me otherwise. If the movies (and the occasional Rolling Stone article) has taught me anything, it’s that rock is a corrupting influence. It’s only a matter of time before your head gets big, you abandon your friends and business partners, you succumb to groupies (or in the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, a strangely evil form of gaydom) and drugs get the better of you.

In Bohemian Rhapsody, for instance, Freddie Mercury was far more a uniting force than a dividing force and there’s little evidence of him taking his band mates for granted. Contrary to what the movie states, they all started solo careers around the same time.

I’m not enough of an expert to comment on whether reality serves the story in these cases or the other way around, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some exaggeration was necessary.

Then again, a well-behaved rock and roller is not only a boring story, it seems antithetical to the spirit of rock and roll or any of its variants. Whether the country stylings of Johnny Cash or the sounds of Motown, it seems like music in the last 70 years wouldn’t be what it is if its creators weren’t driven by a rebellious streak.

This isn’t so in the case of Richie Valens. Or at least the version played by Lou Diamond Phillips in the 1987 film La Bamba was pure and angelic. Born Ricky Venezuela to a single Chicano mother, Venezuela was true to his high school sweetheart, forgiving of his abusive brother, and he never had a desire to do anything but earn enough money to buy his mother a house. Valens’ life came to an end in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson in an event that served as a humongous blow to the burgeoning rock and roll movement. It was most famously catalogued in Don McLean’s hit “American Pie” where the term “The Day the Music Died” was coined.

You might say that Richie Valens was a paragon of virtue is giving him an awful lot of the benefit of the doubt considering he died at the age of 17. It’s possible that in an alternative reality, Valens would have knocked up seven girls and killed a cat had he survived to 18. In fact, one of the smarter things the film does is hint at that rock-and-roll-infused destruction and what might have been with Valens’ doppelganger in the form of his wreckless brother Bob who occupies a large role in the film. But 17-year-old Ritchie is rock solid. The film is pretty convincing that this is a man who would have stayed true to himself no matter what happened.

But just like my knowledge of what Johnny Cash or Ray Charles is limited, I don’t really know what the future of Ritchie Vallens held, and in a way it doesn’t matter. Rock stars have always been and always will be legends. In any given point in American history, there have been thousands of people who play the guitar and write songs but through some combination of marketing, luck, and talent, a few become symbols that are part of something larger than themselves.

Valens was immortalized by Don McLean who wanted to use his passing as a metaphor for lost innocence. American culture tended to get pretty metaphorical in that way as it came out the other end of Vietnam. The film chooses to symbolize Valens that way. I’ll take it.

All films I've seen in 2018 ranked 1 to 32

All films I've seen in 2018 ranked 1-32:
1. Green Book-Exactly what our disastrously polarized society needs right now: Throwing political correctness out the window so we can have a real conversation. Think Driving Miss Daisy with a sense of fearless adventure. If humor is about the release of tension, watching these two completely mismatched people go at each other is downright cathartic and hilarious

2. First Reformed-The film’s cinematography is still and meditative, much like the protagonist’s newfound lucidity that doing good involves sacrifices and uneasy compromise. Films about spirituaility and environmentalism are rarely hot topics in moviedom and writer-director Paul Schrader makes the case that these human elements can work cinematically. 
3. The Death of Stalin-Ten times better than anything else Armando Ianucci has done, fitting your style of writing into a historic tragedy and making it hillarious is a high-wire act
4. Disobedience-Orthodox Jewish film about a community outcast (Rachel Weisz) who returns to sex up Rachel McAdams, shot with a Hitchcockonian bent, treats its three leads with a lot of affection
5. Tag-Popcorn comedies can be treated as highish art if done well and this film is sweet, rebellious and does so much right. It's also thematically got a great thematic parable about keeping the best parts about adulthood as you grow up
6. Crazy Rich Asians-Go Asians on screen (is what people are saying)! But this is a film that's legitimately probing into inter-race racism (if that's a term) and classicism specific to the Asian commuhnity and immigration experience, and it's a lot of opulence and scenery porn
7. If Beale Street Could Talk-Better than Moonlight in my book because it was more overt about its racial issues. Beautifully shot and scored although the chronological jumping was more self-congratulatory than useful
8. Leave No Trace-Think a less pretentious "Captain Fantastic" dealing with ADHD and a daughter who has to outgrow her dad sooner than later. By Deborah Granik of "Winter's Bone"
9. Solo-What Star Wars should be like: Quixotic and adventurous, not too rooted in complex mythology, and loaded with fantasical CGI (Full disclosure: Didn't see Last Jedi)
10. Bohemian Rhapsody-Considering I knew nothing about Queen, it was a solid intro to a unique man and his three sort-of-unique band mates (especially the one who still kept that gnarly hairstyle after the 70s). If you already knew about Queen, you'll be less impressed but hopefully enjoy the music deconstructed
11. Ocean’s 8-After seeing "Widows", went back to this one for an execution of a heist film done right. Even with the standard suspension of disbelief, the way they get around James Corden's character is ridiculous but Corden was pretty charming, nice to see him acting. Had more of an emotional uplift than anything in the entire Ocean's 11 trilogy
12. Night School-The premise: novel, the execution: Formulaic but sweet and funny and throws realistic out the window
13. Set It Up-Reminiscent of "Juno" in its efforts to be hip but its cuteness will bowl you over and it's a romantic comedy that ends pretty organically and logically and that rarely happens
14. BlacKkKlansman-This is a guy who "infiltrated" the KKK on the phone? This is like pranking Pizza Hut and saying you've done industrial espionage. It was exciting in parts but not Lee's best work
15. Ant Man and the Wasp-Definitely the kind of fun-for-all-ages film that I imagined Marvel movies used to be modelled after and had room to do big things special effects-wise
16. Ballad of Buster Scruggs-Definitely dark but if you're a fan of Westerns and want to see the different forms of the genres commented on and taken to absurd levels. If it wasn't such a dark murderous year for movies, my patiences for some of these tragic endings might have been greater
17. Black Panther-It's a good movie, I guess? Don't have that much patience for Marvel films that want to be grounded , and now that so many of the must-see films are commentary on the African-American experience in America in some way, the profoundness of any one of these gets diluted. It still had very awesome visuals and I liked the message of the hero that the end goal was peace and not fighting all slights (too bad some of the more extreme leftist voices liked the villain more)
18. The Clapper-It's a pretty low-stakes comedy but the subject matter has some pretty stinging satire in how exploitative our media (and subsequently all of us who absorb that media) can be of our public figures. Not a bad movie at all
20. Bad Times at El Royale-Shot with a lot of stylistic flair and some very memorable scenes. Again, it was a dark year and I kind of got fatigued of so many people **SPOILER** dying meaningless deaths. If you dig the look and the performances, you'll get this film.
21. Dog Days-Very sweet. I got a little teary at the end. Although you know from the very beginning that all the romantic pairs are gonna get together because this is the romantic comedy. So it's not the most organic film
22. Beirut-The Jon Hamm character is very interesting because he has an attachment to a certain kid from the other side of the battle lines and he has a bit of that Don Draper stoicness in geopolitical negotiations. The plot was compelling up to a certain point and then became sleep-inducing (although maybe it was my particular level of fatigue the night I watched the film). So close to being memorable.
23. Tomb Raider-Alicia Vikander and Anjelina Jolie both have the same number of Oscars, but as far as I can tell, Anjelina Jolie was mostly sold to audiences in the 2000s like waitresses at Hooters are sold to potential diners. I’m a sucker for archeological jungle adventures and while the McGuffin was ridiculously weak, the Alicia Vikander character was progressive without being obnoxious, compelling, and was a unique style of action star (mainly crashing into objects with minimal impact). The races and set pieces were pretty solid.

23. Sierra Burgess is a Loser-The protagonist is a teenager who is entirely comfortable with being bullied and eventually uses it to her advantage to get something she wants out of it, that's something novel.
24. Ibiza-Pretty standard "people go on a Spring Break like experience and get wild" film

25. Widows-Loved the way that director Steve McQueen treated such a diverse type of cast members with equal focus but the whole heist thing was a mess. Either they wanted to make the heist intentionally confusing to the point of being forgettable, it was a red herring, or they just fumbled it
26. Thoroughbreads-Nice seeing the young woman from Bates Motel do some acting but this was just dark
27. Ready Player One-I was thinking it was nice to see something other than a sequel, but this was like the quasi-sequel to every film from the 80s. It was almost like fetishizing unoriginality
28. Red Sparrow-A bit gruesome and repetitive but a largely coherent plot and less nihilistic than the female spy thriller I saw last year “Atomic Blonde.” Spy thrillers like these often have too many twists and turns and that can lose viewers at light speed, so that this is a coherent story is a major accomplishment. I also imagine a decent sociology thesis can be written about everything this movie has to say about female sexuality and cinema.

29. Racer and the Jailbird-I thought this would be an exciting film about a female race car driver and a prisoner but it's a dark, dark film. If I had known it was a dark film about two people who suffer a lot, maybe I'd have been more ok with it even if I knew it wasn't a popcorn film?
30. Shock and Awe-A film about hotshot journalism which committed the sin of tedium. Cute romantic plot with James Marsden and Jessica Biel though
31. Game Night--I hardly see a reason to justify this film’s existence. A couple (Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman) like playing games? That’s the hook? The violent take on comedy has been done a million times and it just feels tacked on here. The “when is this real, when isn’t this real” tension is stripped of its meeting when we know the plot is “thing that they think isn’t real becomes real.”
32. A Wrinkle in Time-This children’s film doesn’t treat its mythology as something worth caring about yet asks us to endure excruciatingly boring technobabble about said non-interesting mythology. The film is too tonally bizarre and its character dynamics too uninteresting to care about anything at all that’s happening on screen.