Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips) begins the movie as a peach farm picker, along with his ambitious mother Connie (Rosanna DeSoto) and his hottie would-be girlfriend Rosie (Elizabeth Peña).
Richie's hunky but troubled older half-brother Bob (Esai Morales), recently paroled from prison, shows up with money from drug dealing and seduces Rosie.
With Bob's cash, the family is able to move into a Los Angeles barrio. Bob and Rosie live together in one small house, where their relationship is stormy due to Bob's drinking and insatiable sexual appetite. Connie lives next-door with Richie and his two much younger sisters.
At high school, Richie meets Donna (Danielle von Zerneck), a pretty Anglo teen whose car dealer father (Sam Anderson) is racist and tries to stop the relationship. Meanwhile, Richie's career as a singer and guitarist takes off. He joins a band, they get gigs, and Richie is spotted by small-time record label owner Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano), who signs him up.
In no time, Ritchie Valens (his stage name) has national hit records "Come On Let's Go," "Donna," and "La Bamba." He appears twice on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, in Alan Freed's New York City stage show, and has the ill-fated tour with Buddy Holly (Marshall Crenshaw), The Belmonts, and the Big Bopper (Stephen Lee). The winter tour bus has no working heater and the frigid rock 'n' roll stars charter a plane with tragic results.
How others will see it. La Bamba was a box office smash and launched the careers of Lou Diamond Phillips and Esai Morales. The film was less of a breakthrough for writer and director Luis Valdez, who has had little film work since. The movie did garner a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture but was ignored by the Oscars.
Today at imdb.com, the film has a modest 14K user votes and a surprisingly low user rating of 6.6 out of 10. The ratings are at least consistent across age and gender demographics. User reviews focus on the musical talent that went into the film, i.e. veteran Latino band Los Lobos and Carlos Santana. Forgotten are the 1980s minor rock stars with bit roles: Marshall Crenshaw, who had often been compared with Buddy Holly; and Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats, who had a '50s rockabilly sound.
How I felt about it. The first question that comes to mind is, how big a rock'n'roll star was Ritchie Valens? His three hits are readily found on youtube and grade between 91 and 93 if only his vocals, which are excellent, are taken into account, and not his guitar playing, which is less than remarkable. Valens' talent at a young age is impressive, but his importance is certainly less than, for example, Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry.
A more significant question is, how accurate is the movie? First of all, Phillips was several years older and better looking than Valens, and we won't discuss the looks of Bob and Rosie versus their real-life counterparts. The infamous coin toss that put Valens on the charter plane, instead of Holly's guitarist, took place at the gig, rather than outdoors during the harsh Iowa winter. Valens had a number of girlfriends, including on tour, during his short life. Poor Bob really gets a workover: drunk, abusive, and wallowing in self-pity.
The biggest aggravation though, for most, is the premonitions of Valens' death in a plane crash. He says as much to Keane, and much is made over his talisman and its breakage. It is true, though, that a freak plane collision did occur over Valens' high school playground, killing and injuring many of his schoolmates. Valens did indeed escape this because he was at his grandfather's funeral.
Los Lobos' work has received much praise, but the truth is, Valens' own hit recordings are considerably better than the Los Lobos versions. Valdez should have found a singer (and perhaps an actor) who at least sounded like the real Valens. Valens sang with a heavy Chicano accent on "Come On, Let's Go" and "La Bamba." He sang without a noticeable accent on "Donna," his biggest hit during his life though less known than "La Bamba" today.