‘Halftime’ Review: JLo’s Netflix Documentary Captures Her Most Vulnerable Moments

Jennifer Lopez’s new documentary, Halftime—which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday night, and will release on Netflix on June 14—ostensibly captures JLo at her mid-way point: Turning 50, booked for the Super Bowl, and on the campaign trail for an Oscar. But what’s striking about this snapshot of the superstar is how much of it features Lopez almost, but not quite, getting what she wants. She doesn’t win the Oscar for Hustlers—doesn’t even get nominated, thanks to an Academy snub. The halftime show is a hit, but comes with the frustrating caveat of Lopez being forced to split her stage time with Shakira. Even at JLo’s level of success, she’s still fighting tooth and nail for an extra minute on stage. In that way, Halftime feels refreshingly honest—or, at least, as honest as pop star documentaries tend to get—even if it can’t quite find its way to an overall satisfying narrative.

Directed by Amanda Micheli, whose 2017 documentary Vegas Baby premiered at Tribeca in 2016, Halftime opens on Lopez’s 50th birthday. After blowing out candles in her trailer, she tells the camera she feels like her life is only just beginning. She’s right. Soon after turning 50, Lopez has her biggest year in decades. First, there are the rave reviews and early Oscar buzz for her performance in Lorene Scafaria’s stripper crime drama, Hustlers. Then she’s tapped to headline the 2020 Super Bowl LIV halftime show in Miami—well, co-headline, with Shakira. After breezing through a crash course on JLo’s early years, those two storylines unfold: Will she win the Oscar? And will she pull off the halftime show of her dreams?

Of course, in the time since the documentary was filmed, Lopez has been in the spotlight for another reason—her renewed relationship with her now-fiancé Ben Affleck. If you’re looking for gossip on that front, prepare to be disappointed. Affleck is featured in the film exactly once, in a 30-second talking-head clip that you can watch in the trailer. It’s clear both Lopez and Micheli aren’t interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the superstar’s home life. This isn’t a celebrity tabloid. This is a movie about an artist who wants, more than anything, to be taken seriously.

On the Oscar front, Micheli demonstrates exactly how the media machine got the idea of an Academy Award firmly lodged in Lopez’s mind. Lopez listens intently on FaceTime as her publicist reads her reviews from the Hustlers premiere. The praise for Lopez’s performance is lavish, and the Oscar buzz is already brewing. Lopez also reads the reviews herself, on her phone in a hotel bed, tearing up when she reads a line in a review round-up piece in Glamour that says “it’s thrilling to see a criminally underrated performer get her due from prestige film outlets.” Following her Golden Globe nomination, she tries on dress after dress for the ceremony, finally landing on one with a giant golden bow—the kind of dress, she wryly observes, that you don’t want to lose in. She wants this, badly, and doesn’t bother pretending otherwise. And when the Globe loss (going instead to Laura Dern for Marriage Story) and Academy snub happen, she is clearly crushed. “I just feel like I let everyone down,” she says.

Then there’s the Super Bowl. It’s the biggest stage in entertainment, every performer’s dream, and yet it is, as Lopez tells one of her team members, “a nightmare from the beginning.” Here is where you’ll see most of Lopez’s so-called diva moments, from declaring the runway not good enough to pleading on the phone for an extra minute of stage time: “I’m trying to give you something with substance, not just us out there shaking our fucking asses and doing fucking belly dances.” You understand her frustration. Because she’s splitting her time with Shakira, she gets about six minutes to cram in all of her hits; whereas most previous Super Bowl performers got 12 to 14 minutes. Her longtime manager Benny Medina frankly calls it “an insult. You need two Latina women to do what has always been done by one performer?” Lopez is not quite as openly angry, but she does say, in a low moment, that having two people perform was “the worst idea ever.”

An underdeveloped political narrative also weaves its way into the Super Bowl portion of the doc. Lopez, struck by the image of children in cages under former President Trump’s expansion of immigration detention camps, wants to feature her own daughter singing “Let’s Get Loud” from a cage, as well as other children in cages around the field, to make a powerful statement for the finale. But the night before the big game, the order comes down from “the highest authority in the NFL,” according to Medina, to cut the cages completely. Lopez pushes back, telling her manager to do whatever it takes to keep her message—which she feels is about humanity, not politics—in the show. He does, and the cages stay, though they perhaps take less prominence than was originally planned.

It’s the most interesting part of the documentary, and it feels like a thread there that Micheli could have tugged on. But Halftime isn’t the story of a political awakening, the way 2020’s Miss Americana was for Taylor Swift. Nor is it an intimate behind-the-curtain view of a superstar, the way Five Foot Two was for Lady Gaga. But it is an honest portrait of an incredibly successful performer in her fifties who still struggles every day for recognition. By documenting her Ls, Micheli captures Lopez’s raw vulnerability with compassion. What more could you want from a pop star movie?

Halftime will begin streaming on Netflix on June 14.