Lawrence.com

"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.